Sergey Brin Says Google Missed Out on Early Adoption of Cryptocurrency Technology

The co-founder of Google said the company 'failed to be on the bleeding edge' of blockchain during a crypto summit in Morocco.

Google’s co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Brin has acknowledged that Google missed out on early adoption of blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrency.

“We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge [of blockchain], I'll be honest,” Brin told a crypto conference in Morocco this weekend.

He also mentioned that blockchain as the technology of the future may be in the eye of X, the semi-secret Alphabet division for innovation and development of new technologies.

Brin revealed that he didn’t know a lot about cryptocurrency, but the mining of virtual coins got him interested in the topic, especially the blockchain technology, which he described as “fascinating”.

“A year or two ago my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC,” Brin said. "I told him If we get a gaming PC we have to mine cryptocurrency. So we got an ethereum miner on there and we’ve been making a few pennies and dollars since.”

Brin participated in a panel about the potential of cryptocurrency technology, part of the 2018 Blockchain Summit in Morocco, organized by co-founder of Virgin Group Sir Richard Branson and Bitfury crypto service company. The panel discussed blockchain capabilities, the zero-knowledge proof concept, and global crypto regulatory policies.

The panel included Neha Narula, the director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, former US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) member Annette Nazareth, former US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair Jim Newsome, and former Guns n’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum.

At the panel, former CFTC Chairman Newsome backed SEC and CFTC crypto policies but said that proper regulation needs more time to be effective.

“We are still in the early stages of this technology’s development. We’re in the first inning of a very long ball game. So we need to be careful not to rush regulators too much. Because typically when you rush regulators, they tend to get it wrong,” Newsome said.