President Obama's adviser meets with R3 members, blockchain influence has penetrated the White House

On May 20, advisers to U.S. President Barack Obama hosted representatives from distributed ledger banking consortium R3CEV and three other bitcoin and blockchain industry groups at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

Participants included Tim Grant, managing director of R3, Joseph Bonneau, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group Coin Center, a researcher at Stanford University’s Applied Cryptography Group, and Simon Johnson, professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

For more than an hour, the group provided an overview of blockchain technology to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and answered questions about the technology’s current and potential impact on the U.S. economy.

In an interview with reporters, Grant said the event demonstrated the president’s technology advisor’s interest in the development of blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

Grant said:

“What this means remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that (blockchain) influence has seeped into the White House.”

A full transcript of the meeting can be found here.

What it means to the White House

It is reported that those attending the meeting also included John Holdren, co-chair of the committee and assistant to President Obama for science and technology, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and more than two dozen others.

(Photo: John Holdren, Assistant to President Obama for Science and Technology)

According to Gran, during a private lunch after the meeting, participants answered questions from consultants about blockchain technology.

Notably, members expressed particular curiosity about the cryptographic nature of blockchain technology and its potential to prevent another “Lehman-style economic crisis,” a topic that featured prominently during R3’s presentation.

Grant told CoinDesk:

“I feel it is my responsibility to present a balanced view of our distributed ledger community.”