Most Influential: Bo Hines

It was a job that didn’t exist before, occupied by a person who hadn’t been in government before, but when U.S. President Donald Trump opened a new crypto adviser role in his White House, he brought in a former college football star and would-be politician to act as his first executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.

This feature is a part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 list.

Bo Hines, who had been known for his stint as a wide receiver at North Carolina State University and at Yale before a couple of unsuccessful runs for Congress, took on a very different role as a kind of cheerleader for Trump’s pro-crypto policy efforts. He helped David Sacks, the president’s crypto czar, advance various initiatives, including the crypto industry’s biggest U.S. policy success to date: the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act to regulate U.S. stablecoin issuers.

Though he’d also worked on the not-yet-achieved federal bitcoin BTC$90,494.54 reserve and on the legislation to set regulations for the wider crypto industry that’s still crawling through the U.S. Senate, the GENIUS Act was the high-water mark of his White House tenure.

Hines and his allies managed a relatively rapid push through the Senate, drawing a massive bipartisan vote, and a quick, matching approval from the House of Representatives. He was able to celebrate with the president when Trump signed the bill into law, marking a major achievement for his administration.

Following that win, Hines hung up his White House hat and took a job as the chief U.S. executive for Tether, the stablecoin giant that — in light of the GENIUS Act — had designs on breaking fully into the U.S. market. Hines was replaced by Patrick Witt, a former McKinsey & Co. executive and who also happened to have played for the same Yale Bulldogs as quarterback, and he’s picked up the same agenda items Hines had worked on.