President Trump announced the first 13 members of his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on Wednesday, assembling a roster of some of the most prominent figures in the technology industry. The council includes Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Lisa Su, Michael Dell, and Safra Catz. It will be co-chaired by David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto adviser, and former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios.
The cryptocurrency sector secured direct representation through Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen of a16z, widely regarded as one of the most influential crypto investors globally. The council’s stated mission is to advise the president on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Its broader aim is to keep the United States ahead of international competitors and ensure Americans benefit from what the administration describes as a new era of innovation.
Separately, shares of Circle rebounded sharply one day after the company experienced its worst single-day stock decline on record. Research firm Bernstein moved to clarify the situation, arguing that investors should not conflate stablecoin issuers with distributors. Bernstein’s position is that yield restrictions under the proposed Clarity Act apply to platforms that pass interest directly to users, not to Circle, which earns income on reserves without paying yield to token holders.
Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan described the selloff as exaggerated, pointing out that yield has not historically been the primary driver of stablecoin adoption. He noted that the stablecoin market has grown beyond $200 billion largely because the instruments simplify the movement of dollars across borders, not because they pay interest. Ark Invest, led by Cathie Wood, purchased approximately 161,513 shares of Circle across three of its exchange-traded funds on Tuesday, a position valued at roughly $16.3 million at the day’s closing price.
E-commerce platform Whop, which processes $3 billion in annual payouts for more than 21 million users across 144 countries, launched a new product called Whop Treasury this week. The yield feature is built directly into the platform and is powered by Aave, Plasma, and Tether. Users who opt in can earn up to 6% annual percentage yield on idle balances automatically, with funds routed through a Veda vault into Aave’s lending markets and continuously compounded without requiring gas fees or wallet management.
The product’s infrastructure relies on Tether for its stablecoin layer, MoonPay for onramps, and Tether’s own Wallet Development Kit for wallet infrastructure. Support for BTC and ETH is listed as forthcoming. Aave founder Stani Kulechov has argued for years that decentralized finance reaches its greatest potential when it serves users who never interact with underlying protocols directly, and Whop Treasury represents a large-scale test of that premise.
Google published a formal timeline on Tuesday targeting 2029 for the full transition of its infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography, describing the threat as closer than commonly perceived. Android 17 will incorporate ML-DSA, a quantum-resistant algorithm standardized by NIST, and Google Cloud is set to follow. IBM has outlined a parallel fault-tolerant quantum roadmap aimed at the same year. For Bitcoin, Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp told reporters the network remains several orders of magnitude away from facing a cryptographically relevant quantum threat, though developers have recently merged BIP 360, a quantum-resistant address format, into Bitcoin’s formal improvement repository.
Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds attracted nearly $2.5 billion in inflows over the past month, nearly offsetting all year-to-date outflows. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas described the sustained demand as remarkable given a 40% price decline, geopolitical tensions, and difficult macroeconomic conditions. IBIT has turned positive for the year and ranks among the top 2% of all ETFs by year-to-date flows. With $15 billion in Bitcoin options set to expire on Friday, one additional strong inflow day would push full-year ETF flows into positive territory.
Originally reported by Decrypt.
