(Reuters) -U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday said he was appointing former PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) Chief Operating Officer David Sacks as his "White House A.I. & Crypto Czar," another step towards overhauling U.S. policy.
"He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S.," Trump said in a post on his social-media site Truth Social, without saying whether "czar" was an official title.
The crypto czar and other officials in Trump's incoming administration such as the chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are expected to reshape U.S. policy on digital currency along with a newly created crypto advisory council.
Trump's tech backers generally want to see minimal regulation around artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, saying Washington would throttle growing innovative sectors with excessive rules.
Elad Gil, an entrepreneur who has invested in companies such as Airbnb (NASDAQ:ABNB) and the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN), called the choice of Sacks a "strong move" in a post on X. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X, "congrats to czar @DavidSacks!"
"Sacks will likely have a light touch on regulation, but not without some guardrails," Steve Jang, founder of Kindred Ventures, told Reuters. Jang has co-invested with Sacks in both cryptocurrency and AI startups.
He predicted that Sacks will prioritize regulating how AI is used in certain critical applications instead of focusing on regulating the development of the AI models themselves. This distinction was a key point of contention for Silicon Valley investors who vehemently opposed California's unsuccessful SB 1047 bill, which sought to regulate AI model development.
Trump announced on Wednesday that he was nominating prominent Washington lawyer and crypto advocate Paul Atkins to lead the SEC, in a move celebrated by the industry.
Trump - who once labeled crypto a scam - embraced digital assets during his campaign, promising to make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet" and to accumulate a national stockpile of bitcoin.
Bitcoin broke $100,000 for the first time on Wednesday night, a milestone hailed even by skeptics as a coming-of-age for digital assets as investors bet on a friendly U.S. administration to cement the place of cryptocurrencies in financial markets.
Matthew Dibb, chief investment officer at cryptocurrency asset manager Astronaut Capital, described the news as extremely bullish. "David has had somewhat of a hands-on approach to crypto over the years, at times holding coins such as solana. He appears to be a lot more technically and commercially competent regarding crypto than most would think," Dibb said.
Born in South Africa, Sacks, 52, is a co-founder of venture capital firm Craft Ventures and an early leader of PayPal, a payment processing firm that was acquired by eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) in 2002.
Sacks is considered a member of the "PayPal Mafia" of former workers and executives at the digital finance firm that includes prominent Trump supporters Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Musk, the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO who leads artificial intelligence startup xAI, is a crypto fan and was appointed by Trump as co-lead of the new Department of Government Efficiency. The advisory board to streamline government is nicknamed DOGE, the name of a cryptocurrency.
Sacks is also a former chief executive of software company Zenefits and founded Yammer, a social network for enterprise users.
He was an early evangelist of cryptocurrencies, telling CNBC in a 2017 interview that he believed the rise of bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, was revolutionizing the internet.
"It feels like we are witnessing the birth of a new kind of web. Some people have called it the decentralized web or the internet of money," he said.
Trump said Sacks will also lead a White House advisory council on science and technology.