David Sacks stepped down Thursday as the White House’s AI and crypto czar after hitting the 130-day limit for special government employees. He will move to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) alongside Michael Kratsios, a broader advisory role covering AI, quantum computing, and nuclear power. Other PCAST members include Marc Andreessen, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Mark Zuckerberg, and early Coinbase backer Fred Ehrsam.

The departure closes a tenure that reshaped the federal government’s posture toward digital assets but left its biggest deliverables unfinished. Sacks drove the passage of the GENIUS Act on stablecoins and championed the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve seeded with government-seized BTC. He also pushed for comprehensive market structure legislation, predicting early on that crypto bills could clear Congress within the administration’s first 100 days. That timeline came and went.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that would split oversight between the SEC and CFTC, passed the House with bipartisan support but has stalled in the Senate Banking Committee. A recent compromise on stablecoin yield between Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks cleared one major roadblock, and a committee markup is now targeted for the second half of April. But open disputes over DeFi provisions and ethics language (specifically whether senior officials can personally profit from crypto) remain unresolved.

The timing raises a practical question for the industry: who now carries this legislation inside the White House? Sacks’ new role on PCAST is wider in scope and less operationally focused on crypto. Senator Bernie Moreno has warned that if the bill doesn’t reach the Senate floor by May, it risks going dark until after the midterms. Coin Center executive director Peter Van Valkenburgh put it more bluntly, warning that relying on “short-term friendly discretion” from the current administration instead of durable law would be a strategic mistake the industry may not recover from.