Trump appoints former PayPal COO David Sacks as AI and crypto czar

(Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday said he was appointing former PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) Chief Operating Officer David Sacks to be his White House Artificial Intelligence and Crypto Czar.

“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.

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.

Sacks is also a former chief executive of software company Zenefits and founded Yammer, a social network for enterprise users.

Trump said Sacks will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.