Incorporated in Switzerland as a Bitcoin wallet service provider, Xapo has announced the formation of an advisory board with three eminent Wall Street personalities. Founder of payment service Visa Dee Hock, former Chairman & CEO of Citibank John Reed, and former Secretary of Treasury under President Bill Clinton Lawrence H. Summers will now counsel the Bitcoin startup on building a global Bitcoin ecosystem.
Mr. Hock said: “We live in the 21st century but are still using command and control organizational structures from the 16th century. Bitcoin is one of the best examples of how a decentralized, peer-to-peer organization can solve problems that the dated organizations cannot.”
John Reed, under whose leadership Citibank created the modern ATM, said: “Bitcoin is truly the best iteration of a universal ledger we’ve ever seen. The mere fact that there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins and that each Bitcoin can be divided into 100 million units makes it a significant improvement of any historical form of currency.”
Lawrence H. Summers commented that, “Bitcoin offers, for the first time, a method for transferring value and making payments from anywhere to anywhere, in real-time, without any intermediary. This could mean we soon see many billions of people sending Bitcoin everyday as easily as they currently send a text message.”
The involvement of these eminent personalities from finance, economics, and public policy will definitely boost the confidence of the digital currency community which is fearing the announcement of stringent Bitcoin regulations before the end of this month.
About Xapo
The Bitcoin wallet and cold-storage vault service provider Xapo has an office in Palo Alto, California and operates worldwide. The startup has raised $40 million from prominent investor groups such as Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Fortress Investment Group, Ribbit Capital and Emergence Capital Partners.