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Billionaire Lasry, Ex-CFTC Head Giancarlo Invest in Crypto Firm BlockTower

Giancarlo confirmed the investment but declined to comment further, the report said.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 12:20 p.m. Published Mar 2, 2021, 11:21 p.m.

Digital Dollar Project Director Christopher Giancarlo will be one of four witnesses testifying before the House Financial Services Committee Fintech Task Force on the digital dollar Thursday.

Hedge-fund manager and sports-team co-owner Marc Lasry and former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo have taken stakes in crypto-asset and blockchain investment firm BlockTower Capital, Bloomberg reported.

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Financial terms weren't disclosed.
While Lasry heads investment firm Avenue Capital, his stake is on his own behalf, Bloomberg said citing people familiar with the matter. Lasry is also co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, a National Basketball Association team.
Giancarlo, who has also been an executive at swaps brokerage GFI Group, was known as “Crypto Dad” during his tenure as CFTC head from 2017-2019. He is co-founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation.
Giancarlo confirmed the investment but declined to comment further, Bloomberg said.

Chris Giancarlo Marc Lasry BlackTower

Kevin Reynolds

Kevin Reynolds is editor-in-chief at CoinDesk. Prior to joining the company in mid-2020, Reynolds spent 23 years at Bloomberg, where he won two CEO awards for moving the needle for the entire company and established himself as one of the world's leading experts in real-time financial news. In addition to having done almost every job in the newsroom, Reynolds built, scaled and ran products for every asset class, including First Word, a 250-person global news/analysis service for professional clients, as well as Bloomberg's Speed Desk and the training program that all Bloomberg News hires worldwide are required to take. He also turned around several other operations, including the company's flash headlines desk and was instrumental in the turnaround of Bloomberg's BGOV unit. He shares a patent for a content management system he helped design, is a Certified Scrum Master, and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He owns bitcoin, ether, polygon and solana.