Former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo joins Digital Asset's board

Published at: Jan. 25, 2022

Chris Giancarlo, who served as chair for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission until 2019, will be joining the board of directors for blockchain startup Digital Asset.

In a Tuesday announcement, Digital Asset said Giancarlo would be providing counsel on asset tokenization, distributed ledger technology, and the possible impact of regulatory developments on the crypto space. The former CFTC chair is currently working as senior counsel at the Willkie Farr & Gallagher law firm, and co-founded the Digital Dollar Project, a non-profit organization aimed at generating data to inform U.S. lawmakers on developing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC.

“We are on the precipice of a digital economic transformation that will necessitate safe and secure ways for businesses to interconnect and share assets,” said Giancarlo.

I’m excited to join the board of @digitalassetcom at this critical stage in emerging #web3 evolution. https://t.co/NXJW9dtafk

— Chris Giancarlo (@giancarloMKTS) January 25, 2022

During his time as CFTC chair, Giancarlo also served as a member of the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Committee, the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, and the executive board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions. Many in crypto and blockchain referred to him as “Crypto Dad” for supporting digital assets during his five years at the CFTC, including overseeing the launch of regulated Bitcoin (BTC) futures and advocating for a “do no harm” approach to blockchain regulation.

Giancarlo was replaced as chair by Heath Tarbert in July 2019, for whom current CFTC commissioner Rostin Behnam took over in 2021 as acting chair before being confirmed by the Senate in December. Though no longer serving in an official capacity for any U.S. government agency, the Crypto Dad was on the board of directors at BlockFi for four months in 2021, and recently joined blockchain investment firm CoinFund as a strategic advisor.

Related: Chris Giancarlo: U.S. risks becoming 'backwater' without central bank digital currency

Digital Asset has raised more than $300 million through funding rounds since its founding in 2014, most recently raising $120 million in a Series D financing round in April 2021. The firm has acquired firms in the crypto and blockchain space including Hyperledger, Bits of Proof, Blockstack and Elevence.

Tags
Business
Digital Asset
Cftc
Cbdc
Digital Dollar
Related Posts
Adapt or die: Payments giants partner with crypto firms to ensure security
Institutional interest for digital assets continues to grow rapidly, demonstrating that cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and nonfungible tokens (NFT) are here to stay. At the same time, traditional financial institutions are beginning to understand the dire need to properly support digital assets. For example, although payments giants such as Mastercard and Visa currently offer crypto-enabled credit and debit cards, these companies are also forming partnerships with crypto organizations to enable better security and trust for consumers transacting with digital currencies. Shedding light on the matter, Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, told Cointelegraph that Mastercard’s customers and other partners …
Adoption / Sept. 21, 2021
Unitize Roundup: Top 10 Quotes From the Virtual Blockchain Conference
The five-day Unitize virtual blockchain conference organized by BlockShow and San Francisco Blockchain Week ended with the final session on Friday. The event saw appearances from Heath Tarbert, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum; and Tim Draper, a serial blockchain investor, as well as other speakers from a diverse pool of market segments both within and outside the crypto space. Blockchain adoption, decentralized finance, central bank digital currencies and the future of Bitcoin (BTC) dominated the conversation in many of the panels. The event also saw speakers chart possible paths forward for …
Adoption / July 12, 2020
HSBC and IBM create successful multi-ledger CBDC demo
On Thursday, HSBC and IBM announced the successful test of an advanced token and digital wallet settlement between two central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, in a cloud environment. The experiment consisted of transactions between CBDCs, eBonds, and forex. IBM's Hyperledger Fabric and enterprise technology provider R3's Corda served as the basis of the distributed ledger facilitating the transactions. The project was overseen by central bank Banque de France as part of a series of tranche projects to implement a digital Euro. Previously the French and Swiss central banks reported positive results on a pilot run of the digital Swiss …
Adoption / Dec. 16, 2021
MIT, Boston Fed give digital dollar CBDC a modest test run
The world recently got a sneak peek at what a digital dollar, or at least one component of a hypothetical United States central bank digital currency (CBDC), might look like, courtesy of Project Hamilton, a collaborative effort of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. The results of the project’s first phase were originally expected last summer but were released on Feb. 3. The project, announced in 2020, is named in honor of Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, and Margaret Hamilton, an MIT staffer who contributed to NASA’s Apollo program. Researchers developed two …
Adoption / Feb. 11, 2022
Draft bill to ban China’s digital yuan from US app stores
Lawmakers in the United States are moving to protect the country from the potential undesirable impacts of the global adoption of China’s national digital currency. Three Republican senators, Tom Cotton, Mike Braun and Marco Rubio, introduced a bill on Wednesday, aiming to limit the use of China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the United States. The bill is referred to as “Defending Americans from Authoritarian Digital Currencies Act” and proposes to prohibit the use of China’s digital currency payment system, e-CNY, for U.S. app stores and other purposes. The term “app store” covers all publicly accessible websites, software apps …
Regulation / May 27, 2022