New emails from the Epstein Estate, released this week by the House Oversight Committee, reveal that the financier and convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein assisted MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito in the funding of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, and that at least some of the funding was directed towards Bitcoin Core development.

While public reports have hinted that some of Epstein’s funding may have been directed to the Media Lab’s DCI, which at the time served as the main funding arm for the first digital currency’s reference implementation Bitcoin Core, MIT’s independent investigation of the scandal described mentions of Epstein in concurrence with the DCI as “cursory,” finding only a single instance in which Ito arranged for a meeting between Epstein and his “Bitcoin students.”

In September 2019, Ito handed in his resignation after the investigative journalist Ronan Farrow revealed that the prestigious research facility had received funding from Epstein. MIT had disclosed that the financier had donated a total of $850,000 to the institution, of which $525,000 were directed at the Media Lab.