President Donald Trump appointed the first members of his new Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), including notable crypto representatives.
Crypto Gets A Seat At The Table Where It HappensThe Morning Minute (3.26)
The lineup, a convergence point for AI, big tech and crypto, includes marquee tech leaders such as Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sergey Brin (Google), Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Lisa Su (AMD). The council will be co-chaired by AI and crypto czar David Sacks and David Sacks, former U.S. Chief Technology Officer (US CTO).
Who Are These Representatives?The crypto names forming the council are not minor ones. We are talking about Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Coinbase, one of the largest US centralized exchanges; and Marc Andreessen, who co-founded the VC firm a16z.
Ehrsam left a role as a foreign‑exchange trader at Goldman Sachs in 2012 to launch Coinbase with Brian Armstrong, after the two connected through the Bitcoin subreddit. He served as Coinbase’s first president from 2012 to 2017, helping grow it into the major position it has today, and then stayed on as a board member while becoming a prominent early‑stage investor in the space.
Ehrsam and Andreessen, architects of US crypto venture capital and market infrastructure, are now embedded in a body that advises on competitiveness, innovation, and financial plumbing. This is major specially if we compared to previous cycles, where crypto was mostly on the receiving end of enforcement and guidance rather than sitting inside the advisory structure. This signals digital assets moving deeper into mainstream policy discussions, not farther away.
Market implicationsThe PCAST could eventually translate into more predictable rule‑making, clearer treatment of exchanges and stablecoins, and potentially a friendlier stance toward US‑domiciled crypto infrastructure. In the near term, this is not a “number go up tomorrow” catalyst, but it does strengthens the case for viewing regulatory risk as shifting from pure headwind to a possible moat for compliant players over the next cycle.
Cover image from Perplexity, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
