Democratic Party political operative Jim Messina is joining the board of crypto wallet company Blockchain.com in a move that could help the company gain traction stateside.

Messina, referred to as “the fixer” during his tenure as President Obama’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, also headed up Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign before forming his own consulting firm, The Messina Group.

Messina’s hire, first reported by Axios, also comes just one week after Blockchain.com hired Lane Kasselman as its chief business officer.

Kasselman worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He later became a partner at The Messina Group after it acquired his public relations firm, Greenbrier.

Though Messina is known as a DC power broker, he’s something of an unknown property within Silicon Valley and the larger tech sphere. Nonetheless, this is also part of a larger trend of Obama-era political honchos moving into tech advisory roles. 

David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, joined Uber in 2014 as its Senior VP of Policy and Strategy, five years before the now-ubiquitous company went public. Jay Carney, Obama’s second White House press secretary, took a Senior VP role at Amazon in 2015.

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