Original author: KarenZ, Foresight News
On December 6, Beijing time, US President-elect Trump announced that he would appoint David O. Sacks as the White House Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency. Now, let us unveil the brilliant resume of Crypto Tsar David O. Sacks and learn more about his story with Crypto.
David O. Sackss stellar resume
Trump said, In this position, David O. Sacks will be responsible for guiding the governments policy in the fields of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, both of which are critical to the future competitiveness of the United States. David will work to ensure that the United States becomes the undisputed global leader in these two fields. He will defend free speech online and lead us away from the bias and censorship of large technology companies. He will also work to build a legal framework that provides the cryptocurrency industry with the clarity it has been seeking so that it can thrive in the United States. In addition, David will lead the Presidents Science and Technology Advisory Committee.
Trump further introduced David O. Sacks brilliant resume: Over the past 25 years, David O. Sacks, as an extremely successful entrepreneur and investor, has created and invested in some of the most iconic companies in Silicon Valley. He was the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of PayPal during its founding period and a member of the legendary group PayPal Mafia (a group of former PayPal employees who later developed or founded other technology companies). David O. Sacks then founded the enterprise software company Yammer, which was later acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion. He then founded the venture capital firm Craft Ventures in San Francisco. David O. Sacks is also the co-host of the top podcast in the technology field, All-In Podcast, where he often discusses economic, political and social issues. David has the deep knowledge, rich business experience, outstanding wisdom and pragmatic attitude to lead the United States to glory in these two key technology fields.
In addition, according to Bloomberg, David O. Sacks played a key role in supporting Trumps fundraising from technology industry donors. He also has a close relationship with Vice President-elect JD Vance.
It is worth mentioning that David O. Sacks served as an executive with Musk in the early days of PayPal and is also an investor in Twitter. Musk and David O. Sacks also hosted a billionaire dinner with the theme of Oppose Biden in April this year.
David O. Sacks showed a firm belief in Crypto early on
Early interviews with David O. Sacks reveal his deep insight and strong belief in the cryptocurrency industry.
In 2017, David O. Sacks said in an interview with CNBC that as an early participant in PayPal, after using PayPal, he never thought he would be interested in payments again. But Bitcoin is realizing PayPals original vision of creating a new world currency. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are now realizing this original vision. They do it in a decentralized way (using a decentralized database called blockchain), while PayPal tried to do it in a centralized way.
At the time, David O. Sacks pointed out, It feels like we are witnessing the birth of a new type of network. Some people call it the decentralized network or the Internet of Money. Bitcoin strengthens its scarcity through a combination of cryptography and economic incentives (cryptoeconomics).
In response to the question of How will ICO and future SEC regulation be coordinated, David O. Sacks expressed the hope that the SEC can distinguish between protocol coins (which have practical uses in the software ecosystem and should not be considered securities) and asset coins (which are securities). Most ICO activities are conducted through protocol coins. Better projects have worked hard to build their tokens, so they are not securities. However, David O. Sack also said that he believes that asset coins (traditional asset tokens) will soon appear.
In response to Do digital assets and tokenization pose a long-term threat to traditional venture capital?, David O. Sacks told CNBC that this will definitely pose a challenge to venture capital, and venture capital firms that want to invest before ICOs must compete with angel investors to provide real value-added. In addition, LP interests may be tokenized like most other illiquid assets.
David O. Sacks also pointed out the three major challenges facing cryptocurrencies at the time, namely scalability, slideware (only white paper, PPT stage) and regulation. He listed some of the most promising use cases to date, including value storage, payment, crowdfunding, file storage, identity management and authentication, prediction market, custody, ownership chain, notarization chain, provenance and supply chain.
What is the connection between David O. Sacks and Crypto?
As early as 2018, David O. Sacks joined the advisory board of the core team of the decentralized trading protocol 0x. At that time, 0x also established a partnership with the digital securities platform Harbor, which is also one of the investment portfolios of Craft Ventures and helped incubate Harbor. Harbor provides a digital securities platform supported by blockchain technology for compliant fundraising, investor management and liquidity. Later, in February 2020, Harbor was acquired by digital asset custodian BitGo. David O. Sacks once said in an interview with CNBC that Harbor solves the compliance issues of asset tokenization and has a huge opportunity for blockchain to bring more liquidity and transparency to private securities.
Speaking of Craft Ventures, it is a venture capital firm co-founded by David O. Sacks, which mainly invests in the field of B2B software investment and has successfully raised multiple funds. Craft Ventures first fund raised $350 million. In October 2019, Craft Ventures completed the fundraising of its second fund with a committed capital of $500 million. In November 2023, Craft Ventures raised $1.3 billion through Craft Ventures IV and Craft Ventures Growth II funds.
It is worth emphasizing that David O. Sacks also led investments in Airbnb, Meta, Reddit, Slack, X, Uber and xAI. In terms of Crypto, David O. Sacks led investments in crypto asset management company Bitwise and digital securities platform Harbor at Craft Ventures. In addition, Craft Ventures also led the seed round of financing for DeFi protocol Set Protocol in 2018 (Set Protocol announced in April 2023 that it would stop development and the team would give up multi-signature ownership rights), invested in blockchain-based decentralized map network Hivemapper with Multicoin in April 2022, and participated in Web3-friendly entertainment company Superplastic in February 2023.
Also in 2018, David O. Sacks announced an investment in crypto venture capital firm Multicoin on behalf of Craft Ventures. Multicoin was one of Solana’s early investors and led a $20 million financing round for Solana in July 2019.
David O. Sack is also a firm holder of Solana. In December 2023, David O. Sacks clarified that he did not sell Solana after the FTX incident, and bluntly stated , One of the stupidest attacks against me this year was that I sold Solana (SOL) tokens to retail investors. If that were true, they would have made a lot of money by now. Congratulations to everyone who holds SOL.
Two years ago, David O. Sacks also explored the prospects of Solana in his podcast All-In Podcast. He mentioned that many elites in Silicon Valley have high hopes for Solana and believe that it may eventually surpass Ethereum. Even if this vision is not fully realized, Solana is fully capable of becoming the third largest Crypto.
refer to:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/david-sacks-cryptocurrency-interview.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/06/ex-paypal-david-sacks-on-craft-fund-and-harbor.html
