Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former top financial advisor during the Obama administration, has cut ties with troubled crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG).
Summers joined DCG as a senior advisor in 2016, a year after DCG was formed. It’s not clear when Summers resigned his role — through a spokesperson, Summers told Protos he left DCG several months ago.
However, the former US Secretary of the Treasury was listed on DCG’s website as a member of the company’s advisory board as recently as November. That information has since been removed from DCG’s website.
Summers’ own personal Interneto svetainė was updated on Wednesday, eliminating any mention of his six-and-a-half-year relationship with DCG from his bio – shortly after the professor and DCG were contacted by Protos for this article. A Summers spokesperson said that the professor’s resignation from DCG was part of a “scaling back of commitments,” but declined to detail what other positions Summers had also recently given up.
A spokesperson for DCG did not return a request for comment.
Summers poked the FTX bear at DCG
Summers has previously faced criticism for his role at DCG, most recently due to his comments about Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX. In mid-November, Summers was widely quoted comparing FTX to Enron in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
Following the interview, influential Washington watchdog group The Revolving Door Project said that Summers and Bloomberg should have disclosed the top economist’s own ties to crypto companies including DCG. DCG’s own ties to FTX weren’t disclosed either.
DCG has been under pressure since early November when Genesis Global Capital, a major crypto lender and subsidiary of DCG, halted customer withdrawals in the wake of FTX’s collapse. Genesis, the DCG subsidiary, was a major trading partner with FTX, and had as much as $175 million of its assets stuck at the now bankrupt crypto exchange when it unraveled. DCG also had a small equity investment in FTX.
Source: https://protos.com/larry-summers-gives-up-advisory-role-at-crypto-firm-dcg-amid-criticism/