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Trump’s White House won’t tolerate attacks on the president in crypto bill, adviser says

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Trump's White House won't tolerate attacks on the president in crypto bill, adviser says

President Donald Trump’s negotiators on the U.S. Senate’s crypto market structure bill refuse to sign off on legislation that goes after the president directly for his digital assets business ties — one of the chief points Democrats have demanded in talks over how the U.S. industry should be governed.

Some of the earlier proposals for the ethics provisions in the bill — especially those proposed by Senator Adan Schiff of California — were “completely outrageous,” Patrick Witt, the executive director of the President’s Council for Advisors for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk TV in an interview Tuesday at the Ondo Summit in New York.

“We’ve made clear that there are red lines,” he said. “We’re not going to allow the targeting of the president individually or his family members.”

He said he’s hopeful that Democrats will be pitching more reasonable versions “that feel a little bit closer to something that could ultimately be agreed to.” And he said he thinks a solution will be found.

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“But at the end of the day, this is not an ethics bill,” he said.

Witt led a meeting of crypto policy experts and representatives of the U.S. banking industry on Monday, where the digital assets insiders left frustrated that the bankers hadn’t yet come to the table to offer a way forward on their stablecoin yield disagreements.

He told CoinDesk that the meeting “exposed some new areas of agreement,” but the White House is trying to thread the needle between bankers worried about protecting their own deposit businesses and clearing a path for stablecoin products

“We’re trying to broker a deal,” he said. “My No. 1 job is to get a bill to the president’s desk. He wants to see this bill get done.”

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But it’s the Senate Democrats who may pose the tougher sell at this stage, as they continue to push for crypto limits for senior government officials, along with other major requests.

In the earlier proposals that would have limited government officials’ spouses from industry involvement, “a lot of senators’ wives and husbands maybe would have been put out of work by that,” Witt said.

Democrats met with industry representatives on January 16, two days after a Senate Banking Committee hearing on advancing the legislation fell apart. And the Democratic lawmakers are planning to meet again on Wednesday to keep talking about their approach, according to a person briefed on the plans. If they can’t embrace a compromise bill in the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation may have to be advanced with only Republican support, as a similar version already was in the Senate Agriculture Committee.

In the end, though, legislation will have to have significant Democratic support to pass the Senate, which generally demands a 60-vote majority to approve a bill. The White House directed industry insiders to get their compromise ideas together by the end of February, according to people familiar with the discussion. The longer this legislative process drags on, the harder it’ll be to pass a bill before Congress departs to campaign for this year’s midterm elections.

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Witt was also asked on Tuesday whether he’d be willing to identify how much in crypto the U.S. government currently holds, an especially relevant figure in light of the ongoing presidential plan to set up federal stockpiles.

“No,” he said. “I’m not going to go into that.”

Read More: Senate Agriculture’s crypto market structure draft peppered with Democrat pitches

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Crypto World

Crypto Dev’s Platform Allows AI Agents To Hire Humans For Physical Tasks

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Crypto Dev's Platform Allows AI Agents To Hire Humans For Physical Tasks

In what some may see as a unique and slightly dystopian use of artificial intelligence, a crypto developer has launched a website that enables AI agents to rent humans to do tasks in “meatspace.” 

In a post via X on Monday, user Alex, or @AlexanderTw33ts, an engineer at decentralized finance platform Uma Protocol and layer-2 bridging solution Across Protocol, shared a video of his website “rentahuman.ai” in action. 

The site lets humans set an hourly rate and enables AI agents to hire them for tasks ranging from running simple errands to participating in business meetings, taking photos, signing documents, and making real-world purchases.  

Alex said some of the humans-for-hire already include an OnlyFans model and a CEO of an AI startup, adding: 

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“If your AI agent wants to rent a person to do an IRL task for them its as simple as one MCP call.”

Source: AlexanderTw33ts

The website states that “robots need your body” as they “can’t touch grass,” while labeling itself as “the meatspace layer for AI.” 

On the main page, it shows a selection of available humans, a button to “become rentable,” and a metric for platform growth. 

So far, the site claims almost 26,000 people have signed up; however, that number may include multiple accounts owned by the same person or people impersonating others, which Alex said they have been working to address.

Alex has also confirmed that there will be no cryptocurrency associated with this platform, after sharing more details about the project during an interview on Tuesday on the Crosschain podcast from Across Protocol. 

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“There’s no token, I’m just not into that. That would just be way too stressful, and also again I don’t want a bunch of people to lose their money,” he said.  

Related: Trustless AI agent standard could hit Ethereum mainnet on Thursday

Adding another layer of obscurity to the project, Alex said the website was built through “vibe coding” with an “army” of Claude-based AI agents.

This was achieved with a Ralph loop, a technique of running AI coding agents in a loop until they complete a task.

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“I think we are out of the trough of disillusionment [toward AI capabilities] and now people are realizing we can ship real code with this, we can just write prompts now, we can have Ralph loops creating websites while we sleep,” he said.  

“And actually, a Ralph loop created this [website], I have a custom Ralph loop that I run,” he added.