Trump's AI Brain Trust: A Who's Who of Tech Titans, Crypto Czars, and the DeFi Degens They Brought Along

President Trump unveiled the inaugural 13-member roster for his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) this Wednesday. The guest list reads like a Silicon Valley power ranking, featuring Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet's Sergey Brin, Oracle's Larry Ellison, AMD's Lisa Su, Dell's Michael Dell, and Oracle's Safra Catz.

The council will be helmed by co-chairs David Sacks, who now wears the dual hats of Trump’s AI and crypto czar, and former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios. Crypto finally gets a literal seat at the table, with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and a16z’s Marc Andreessen securing spots—presumably to explain why the blockchain is more than just expensive digital Beanie Babies.

The council's mission is to guide the President on AI and frontier tech, aiming to keep the U.S. in the lead against global rivals and to "ensure all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation." It's a noble goal, assuming they can get everyone to agree on something other than the superiority of their own tech stacks.

Just a day after its most brutal trading session ever, Circle's stock price staged a comeback. Analysts at Bernstein offered a crucial distinction: "Don't conflate stablecoin issuer with distributor." Their take is that the new Clarity Act's yield restrictions are aimed at platforms like Coinbase that pass interest to users, not at Circle itself—so maybe don't shoot the money printer.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan labeled the massive selloff "overblown," pointing out that yield hasn't been the main engine for stablecoin growth. He noted that most stablecoins offer zero interest, yet the total market has still ballooned to over $200 billion. It turns out people just want digital dollars that don't rug pull, a surprisingly low bar.

Never one to miss a fire sale, Cathie Wood's Ark Invest went full degen and bought the dip. The firm scooped up 161,513 shares of CRCL across three of its ETFs on Tuesday, a purchase worth roughly $16.3 million at the closing bell. When there's blood in the water, the innovation ETFs circle.

Whop, the e-commerce giant that funnels $3 billion annually to over 21 million online creators, just rolled out Whop Treasury. It's a slick yield product baked directly into the platform, powered by the DeFi holy trinity of Aave, Plasma Finance, and Tether.

Users can simply opt in, and their idle Whop balance automatically starts earning up to 6% APY. The magic happens behind the scenes: funds become USDT on Plasma, flow into a Veda vault and then into Aave's lending markets, autocompounding all the while—no gas fees, no wallet headaches, and instant withdrawals. It's DeFi for people who think a seed phrase is something you plant.

The supporting cast is star-studded: Tether (which made a strategic investment in Whop), MoonPay for smooth onramps, and Tether's Wallet Development Kit for the backend. Support for BTC and ETH is reportedly coming soon to a roadmap near you.

The kicker? Most of Whop's massive user base has never touched DeFi and never will. This is the exact future Aave founder Stani Kulechov has been preaching: DeFi's deepest liquidity pools are most potent when they serve users who wouldn't know a liquidity pool from a swimming pool.

Twenty-one million digital entrepreneurs just became DeFi users overnight. They probably think APY is a new texting acronym.

Google officially committed to a 2029 deadline to transition its entire infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography this Tuesday, warning the quantum threat is "closer than it appears." The plan includes integrating the NIST-standardized ML-DSA algorithm into Android 17 and across Google Cloud.

To be clear, Google isn't predicting that quantum computers will shatter modern encryption by 2029. They just plan to be ready before the party gets crashed—a prudent move when the party is the entire internet.

For Bitcoin, the quantum menace feels more like a distant storm cloud than an imminent hurricane. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, noted, "We are several orders of magnitude away from having a cryptographically relevant quantum computer." So, plenty of time for a few more halvings.

Bitcoin devs aren't napping, however. BIP 360, a proposal for a quantum-resistant address format, was recently merged into Bitcoin's improvement repository. The bigger challenge for Bitcoin won't be the tech, but the coordination: moving potentially trillions in value across a decentralized network without a central captain could be a 5-10 year saga all on its own.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs demonstrated diamond hands, sucking in nearly $2.5 billion over the last month and nearly wiping out all year-to-date outflows. Bloomberg Intelligence's Eric Balchunas praised the "incredible fortitude" shown during a brutal 40% price drawdown.

For perspective, when gold tanked 40% about a decade ago, roughly a third of its investors headed for the exits. Bitcoin ETF holders largely held the line. BlackRock's IBIT is already back in the green for the year and sits in the top 2% of all ETFs by annual inflows—not bad for an asset class that was supposedly too volatile for boomers.

With a whopping $15 billion in Bitcoin options set to expire this Friday, just one more solid day of ETF inflows could push the full-year flow tally into positive territory. The comeback narrative writes itself.