David Sacks and his funding agency Craft Ventures have divested greater than $200 million in crypto holdings since President Donald Trump named Sacks because the White Home’s AI and crypto czar, in response to a Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, in response to the memo. Sacks additionally held inventory within the on-line brokerage Robinhood and the crypto alternate Coinbase. And he was a restricted companion within the marquee crypto enterprise capital funds Multicoin Capital and Blockchain Capital, together with 90 different VCs.
Whereas Sacks has divested most of his crypto holdings, he and Craft Ventures nonetheless maintain fairness in a collection of corporations. His shares of the crypto custody agency BitGo and the Bitcoin protocol developer Lightning Labs are value about 2.5% and 1.1% of his whole property, respectively, in response to the memo. The federal government, nonetheless, has agreed to waive any conflicts of curiosity concerning Sacks and Craft Ventures’ ongoing stakes in crypto corporations.
“I offered all my cryptocurrency (together with BTC, ETH, and SOL) previous to the beginning of the administration,” Sacks mentioned in a put up on X earlier in March.
He and his agency Craft Ventures didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Dated March 5, the memo on Sacks’ pursuits within the crypto trade follows social media rumblings that the AI and crypto czar risked mixing his personal enterprise with the federal government’s crypto dealings. After Trump posted in early March that sure cryptocurrencies, together with Solana, could be included in a nationwide crypto reserve, critics mentioned that Sacks was boosting his personal portfolio.
And extra naysayers got here out in opposition to Sacks as soon as Trump formally approved the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a digital property stockpile later that week. “It is a direct switch of wealth from the U.S. treasury to David Sacks and different crypto barons,” mentioned Ryan Grim, who runs a well-liked account on X and a politics publication.
Sacks countered that he had divested a lot of his cryptocurrency holdings, and crypto executives got here to his protection. “He’s doing large work and is not going to be sharing in any of the financial upside to keep away from even the slightest look of a battle,” Cameron Winklevoss, cofounder of the crypto alternate Gemini, posted on X.
Trump named Sacks as his AI and crypto czar in December. The then incoming president mentioned Sacks, who’s a former government at PayPal, would information coverage on the regulation of synthetic intelligence and cryptocurrencies.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
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