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On March 25, 2026, the White House announced the first thirteen members of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks — the White House AI and crypto czar — and Michael Kratsios, former US Chief Technology Officer. It includes Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Lisa Su, Michael Dell, and Safra Catz.
It also includes Marc Andreessen and Fred Ehrsam.
For anyone tracking the CLARITY Act's turbulent Senate passage, those two names are not incidental. They are the conclusion of a story that began on January 14, 2026, when the crypto industry split in public — and the two sides of that split are now on different sides of the most important advisory body in American science and technology policy.
What Happened in January
The Senate Banking Committee had scheduled its markup of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act for January 15. The session had been months in the making. The bill had passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 with significant bipartisan support. The crypto industry had collectively spent more than $149 million through Fairshake PAC to build the political conditions for its passage, as FinTech Weekly documented through FEC filings.
The night before the scheduled markup, Brian Armstrong posted on X. Coinbase, he announced, could not support the bill in its current form. The draft's treatment of stablecoin yield was, in his words, "materially worse than the current status quo." He wrote that Coinbase would "rather have no bill than a bad bill." The Senate Banking Committee postponed the markup within hours. More than twenty billion dollars evaporated from crypto-related stocks in the following session.
The reaction from the rest of the industry was immediate and pointed. Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the firm's leading crypto voice, posted publicly: "Now is the time to move the Clarity Act forward." Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev called for US leadership on crypto policy and supported pushing the bill ahead despite its imperfections.
Circle, Ripple, and Kraken maintained their backing. Patrick Witt, the White House crypto adviser, quoted Armstrong's own words back at him: "You might not love every part of the Clarity Act, but I can guarantee you'll hate a future Dem version even more."
The crypto industry had fractured — not along the line of banks versus crypto, but within the industry itself.
Why the Industry Split Is Not What It Appears
The instinct is to read the January divide as a philosophical disagreement about legislative strategy. It was not. It was a commercial one — and understanding the commercial difference between Coinbase's position and everyone else's is the key to understanding everything that has happened since.
Coinbase's relationship with Circle and USDC is structurally unlike any other company's exposure to stablecoin yield. Under their commercial distribution agreement, Coinbase receives nearly all of the interest income generated by USDC reserves held on its platform. Stablecoin revenue totalled approximately twenty percent of total revenue in 2025.
The stablecoin yield prohibition in the CLARITY Act draft does not reduce Coinbase's competitive positioning at the margins. It removes a revenue line that Wall Street has already priced into the stock. Armstrong is the CEO of a public company. He has a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders that no private fund manager shares in the same way.
For Andreessen Horowitz, the calculation runs entirely differently. The firm's crypto portfolio spans hundreds of companies across DeFi protocols, infrastructure providers, layer-one blockchains, exchanges, and custody platforms. The stablecoin yield restriction affects a subset of those companies directly.
The rest of the CLARITY Act — its codification of the SEC-CFTC taxonomy into statute, its establishment of defined regulatory frameworks for crypto exchanges and brokers, its resolution of the jurisdictional ambiguity that has cost the industry billions in legal uncertainty — benefits every single portfolio company.
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each contributed eleven point nine million dollars personally to Fairshake. AH Capital Management contributed an additional twenty three point eight million. That investment was made to produce a regulatory environment in which their portfolio companies can operate with legal clarity. Accepting a yield compromise to secure that environment is, from a16z's perspective, a straightforward trade.
Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase but left the company in 2017. He now runs Paradigm, one of the most significant crypto-native venture capital firms. His exposure to the CLARITY Act's passage is the same as Andreessen's — broad portfolio benefit outweighs specific yield cost. He backed the bill when Armstrong walked away from it.
Chris Dixon framed the commercial logic explicitly in January. The argument was not that the yield restriction was acceptable. The argument was that the bill's total value to the industry exceeded the cost of accepting the yield compromise — and that withholding support risked losing the entire legislative agenda for every participant.
Patrick Witt made the political version of the same argument. A future Democratic administration, he noted, could reverse the March 17 SEC-CFTC joint interpretation through a new interpretive release without congressional action. The CLARITY Act's codification of that classification into statute is the insurance policy against that reversal.
For the companies whose businesses depend on the commodity-versus-security taxonomy remaining settled — which includes most of Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio — losing that insurance policy over a stablecoin yield dispute is not a trade they were willing to make.
The Fight Is Not (Only) Banks Versus Crypto
As FinTech Weekly has reported throughout the CLARITY Act's Senate passage, the banking industry has fought on two fronts simultaneously — through the legislative yield dispute, and through opposition to the OCC charter wave giving crypto firms federal banking infrastructure.
The yield fight directly threatens the deposit base that traditional banks depend on for lending capacity. Standard Chartered analysts have estimated that an unrestricted yield provision could redirect up to five hundred billion dollars in deposits from traditional banks toward stablecoin products by 2028. That number explains why banks have held the line through multiple rounds of White House-brokered compromise. It also explains why the compromise text that emerged last week — reviewed by crypto leaders Monday and bank representatives Tuesday — landed closer to the bank position than to what Coinbase had accepted in February.
The divide within the crypto industry is not about principle. It is about who bears the cost of the compromise. Coinbase bears most of it. Everyone else bears a fraction.
What PCAST Formalises
PCAST is an advisory body. It produces recommendations. It has no regulatory or enforcement authority. Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has established his own version of the council. Its direct influence on the CLARITY Act's final text is limited.
But advisory councils send signals. The signal that PCAST sends is legible to anyone who has followed the CLARITY Act's Senate passage closely. The White House named Marc Andreessen and Fred Ehrsam to the most senior presidential science and technology advisory body in American government.
David Sacks, who personally urged the crypto industry to support the CLARITY Act in January and called Armstrong's withdrawal a risk to the entire legislative agenda, co-chairs it.
The administration has formalised, at the advisory level, whose counsel it is seeking on the technology questions that intersect with crypto policy.
PCAST can have up to twenty-four members. The current thirteen represent the first wave. The White House has room to add eleven more. Who those eleven are — and whether any of them come from the crypto industry — will be the next signal worth watching.
The April Markup and What Comes Next
The Senate Banking Committee markup remains targeted for the second half of April. The updated CLARITY Act text, revised from the draft shared Monday and Tuesday, is expected either late this week or early next week. The industry call that took place this week revealed sharp internal disagreements about whether to accept the current yield language or push for further revision. Coinbase communicated its concerns to Senate staff. No one has made a definitive public declaration of opposition.
Patrick Witt posted on Wednesday: "It's all going to work out. Bullish."
Senator Cynthia Lummis confirmed that her team is working to protect stablecoin rewards while preventing deposit flight from community banks. Senator Bernie Moreno has said explicitly that if the bill does not reach the Senate floor by May, digital asset legislation may not move again before the midterm election cycle makes major votes politically untouchable.
The April markup is the decision point. What the revised text says about stablecoin yield will determine whether the industry's internal divide deepens or resolves. The White House has now formalized, through PCAST, which crypto voices it considers its partners in that decision.
The bill's passage, and the political credit that follows it, will accrue to the people who stayed in the room when the fight was hardest.
Andreessen and Ehrsam stayed. That is why they are on PCAST.
Editor's note: We are committed to accuracy. If you spot an error or have additional information about PCAST or the CLARITY Act negotiations, please email [email protected].
