Bitcoin-Centric Investor Digital Currency Group Sees Investment from Western Union
Frequent bitcoin- and blockchain-focused investment firm Digital Currency Group now sees Western Union as an investor in a new funding round.
Money-transfer giant Western Union is Digital Currency Group’s newest investor, in a new funding round.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is also welcoming new investors to the firm in Beijing-based HCM International Co., a subsidiary of Foxconn Ltd., focused on investments and a number of funds including Gibraltar Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Horizon Kinetics, Kingsbridge Wealth Management, and Wood Investment Partners.
The terms and amount of investment for the funding round wasn’t disclosed in an announcement penned by Barry Silbert, founder of DCG.
In a statement, Silbert shared his views about DCG’s newest investors.
Our investors now span various segments of the financial industry, from banks to insurance companies to global money transfer and payment companies who see the potential of digital currencies and their many applications.
It also includes manufacturing companies and media companies looking to leverage digital currencies and distributed ledgers to create new efficiencies in their business and build new products and services that make the movement of assets and money around the word instant, frictionless and truly borderless.
Adding Key Board Members & Advisors
With the announcement, DCG also named two new board members in Glen Hutchins, the co-founder of private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and a director of AT&T and Nasdaq as well as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Hutchins, who is also part-owner of NBA franchise Boston Celtics said:
Bitcoin technology has the potential, among many other impacts, to transfer the global payments system and DCG aims to be a central force in the transformation.
Lawrence Lenihan, co-founder and co-CEO of venture operating firm Resonance also joins the board, making it a 3-person board along with Silbert.
Notably, DCG will also see bitcoin developer Gavin Anderson join as a senior advisor. So too, will Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, a former Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. He is also the Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama.
Dr. Summers added that “digital currencies, blockchain and ‘the internet of value’ will help create new platforms” that will enable financial inclusion with the technologies’ potential one that could go far with mass adoption.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
