Original author: KarenZ, Foresight News
Reprint: lawrence, Mars Finance
On December 6th, Beijing time, the U.S. President-elect Trump announced the appointment of David O. Sacks as the White House Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency. Now, let us unveil the brilliant resume of "Crypto Czar" David O. Sacks and gain insight into his story with Crypto.
David O. Sacks' Brilliant Resume
Trump stated, "In this position, David O. Sacks will be responsible for guiding the government in formulating policies in the fields of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, both of which are crucial for enhancing America's future competitiveness. David will work to ensure that the U.S. becomes the undisputed global leader in these two fields. He will defend freedom of speech online and lead us away from the bias and censorship of big tech companies. He will also work to build a legal framework to provide the clarity that the cryptocurrency industry has always sought, allowing it to thrive in the U.S. Furthermore, David will lead the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology."
Trump further introduced the impressive resume of David O. Sacks: Over the past 25 years, David O. Sacks has been an extremely successful entrepreneur and investor, creating and investing in some of Silicon Valley's most iconic companies. He was the Chief Operating Officer (COO) during PayPal's founding period and was also a member of the legendary group "PayPal Mafia" (a group of former PayPal employees who later developed or founded other tech companies). Subsequently, David O. Sacks founded the enterprise software company Yammer, which was later acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion. After that, he founded the venture capital firm Craft Ventures in San Francisco. David O. Sacks is also the co-host of the top tech podcast (All-In Podcast), where he often discusses economic, political, and social issues. David possesses deep knowledge, rich business experience, exceptional wisdom, and a pragmatic attitude to lead the United States to glory in these two key tech fields.
In addition, according to Bloomberg, David O. Sacks has played a key role in supporting Trump in fundraising from tech industry donors. He is also closely related to incoming Vice President JD Vance.
It is worth mentioning that David O. Sacks served as an executive alongside Musk during the early days of PayPal and is also one of Twitter's investors. Musk and David O. Sacks also co-hosted a billionaire dinner themed "Against Biden" together in April of this year.
David O. Sacks showed firm belief in Crypto early on.
David O. Sacks' early interviews showcase his deep insights and firm beliefs about the cryptocurrency industry.
In 2017, David O. Sacks stated in an interview with CNBC that as an early participant in PayPal, he never thought he would be interested in payments again after using PayPal. However, Bitcoin is realizing PayPal's original vision of creating "a new world currency." Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are now achieving this original vision. They operate in a decentralized manner (using a decentralized database called blockchain), while PayPal tried to do so in a centralized way.
At that time, David O. Sacks pointed out, "It feels like we are witnessing the birth of a new type of network. Some people call it a decentralized network or the currency internet." Bitcoin reinforces its scarcity through a combination of cryptography and economic incentives (cryptoeconomics).
When responding to the question of how "ICO and future SEC regulation will coordinate", David O. Sacks expressed hope that the SEC can distinguish between "protocol tokens" (which have actual utility in software ecosystems and should not be considered securities) and "asset tokens" (which belong to securities). Most ICO activities are conducted through protocol tokens. Better projects have worked hard to build their tokens, so they are not securities. However, David O. Sacks also stated that he believes we will soon see the emergence of asset tokens (traditional asset tokens).
In response to the question of whether "digital assets and tokenization pose a long-term threat to traditional venture capital?", David O. Sacks told CNBC that it will certainly pose challenges to venture capital, and venture capital firms that want to invest before ICOs must compete with angel investors to provide real added value. In addition, LP equity 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 at the white paper, PPT stage), and regulation. He listed some of the most promising use cases so far, including value storage, payments, crowdfunding, file storage, identity management and verification, prediction markets, custody, ownership chains, notarization chains, provenance, and supply chains.
What is David O. Sacks' connection to 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 Craft Ventures' portfolio companies that helped incubate Harbor. Harbor provides a blockchain technology-backed digital securities platform for compliant fundraising, investor management, and liquidity. Later, in February 2020, Harbor was acquired by digital asset custodian BitGo. David O. Sacks stated in an interview with CNBC that Harbor solved the compliance issues of asset tokenization, offering a huge opportunity for blockchain to bring more liquidity and transparency to private securities.
Speaking of Craft Ventures, this is a venture capital firm co-founded by David O. Sacks, primarily investing in the B2B software investment sector, 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 the Craft Ventures IV and Craft Ventures Growth II funds.
It is important to emphasize that David O. Sacks has also led investments in Airbnb, Meta, Reddit, Slack, X, Uber, and xAI. In the crypto space, David O. Sacks led investments in the crypto asset management company Bitwise and the digital securities platform Harbor at Craft Ventures. In addition, Craft Ventures led the seed round financing for the DeFi protocol Set Protocol in 2018 (in April 2023, Set Protocol announced it would cease development and the team would relinquish multi-signature ownership rights), and in April 2022, it invested together with Multicoin in the blockchain-based decentralized mapping network Hivemapper, and in February 2023, it participated in the investment of Web3-friendly entertainment company Superplastic.
Also in 2018, David O. Sacks announced an investment in the crypto venture capital firm Multicoin on behalf of Craft Ventures. Multicoin was one of the early investors in Solana, leading a $20 million financing round for Solana in July 2019.
David O. Sacks is also a staunch holder of Solana. As of December 2023, David O. Sacks clarified that he did not sell Solana after the FTX incident and frankly stated, "One of the dumbest attacks against me this year was saying that I sold Solana (SOL) tokens to retail investors. If that were true, they should have made a fortune by now. Congratulations to all SOL holders."
Looking back two years, David O. Sacks also explored the prospects of Solana in depth on his podcast (All-In Podcast). He mentioned that many elites in Silicon Valley have high hopes for Solana, believing it could eventually surpass Ethereum. Even if this vision has not been fully realized, Solana is fully capable of ranking third in the crypto space.
