Epstein Was Early Bankroller of Crypto

Coinbase would become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., but in 2014, in its “nascent stage,” Jeffrey Epstein bankrolled it with $3 million. Brokering this deal was “crypto evangelist” Brock Pierce, a former child actor and co-founder of Tether, the world’s largest issuer of stablecoins. That same year, Epstein gave $500,000 to Blockstream, a prominent bitcoin-focused technology firm. However, Epstein’s earliest involvement in cryptocurrencies may have been around 2006 when he became a donor to the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was researching and developing open-source crypto technologies.