Last week we reported that the head of Soros Fund Management has received approval to trade Cryptocurrencies within the next few months.
George Soros had said in the past that he considered Bitcoin to be mere speculation, and as he is the world's richest hedge fund manager and amongst the wealthiest people in the world (19th as of February 2017, according to Forbes) his conversion is seen as significant.
Now the Rockefeller family - another giant of the American financial establishment - is joining the party.
Specifically, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller Foundation, Venrock, has signed a partnership with Coinfund, a Brooklyn-based cryptocurrency investment fund.
We are excited to partner with @pakman and @Venrock for our work in #decentralization and #blockchain! https://t.co/xlxgdiRJ09
— CoinFund (@coinfund_io) April 6, 2018
Rockefeller Brothers Inc. was formed in 1946 by Laurance S. Rockefeller, one of Rockefeller Senior's children, to invest in promising businesses. It was renamed to Venrock (venture+Rockefeller) in 1969. It has invested in startups such as Intel and Apple, which are computer companies that some of you may be familiar with.
David Pakman, partner at Venrock, told Fortune: "We wanted to partner with this team that has been making investments and actually helping to architect a number of different crypto economies and crypto token-based projects."
Jake Brukhman, co-founder of Venrock, said: "We’re trying to cultivate a unique synergy between teams as we see more experienced founders and more traditional tech startups taking up Blockchain ."
American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller died in 1937 having amassed a personal fortune equal to about 1.5 percent of the GDP of the entire United States at the time. He founded the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 with the goal of "promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world." Rockefeller venture capital has invested over $2.5 billion in more than 440 companies.
Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Cardano, posted a wry comment:
Rockefeller, Soros, and Rothschild money entering the cryptocurrency space....it sounds like regulations might be getting a bit more lax
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) April 7, 2018
The old guard certainly do seem to be catching up with the young industry, and if the comments posted below this Twitter post are anything to go by, they may indeed be eyeing it for their own devious ends (#NewWorldOrder).
But not all of the Illuminati are on board - business magnate Warren Buffett remains unwavering in his insistence that he will never invest in Bitcoin, and Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist of the World Bank, recently said that cryptocurrency will negate itself as it becomes more mainstream, as the lack of regulation is in essence what makes it attractive.
