Most Influential: Tyler Williams

Tyler Williams, a former Galaxy Digital regulatory lawyer is the chief crypto adviser for President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department, putting him in the mix on a number of policy aims set out by Trump earlier this year.

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

Williams — an experienced hand in federal government circles, having worked in congressional offices and in an earlier stint at the Treasury — was named by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in February to head up the extended list of crypto efforts. The department was at the center of the president’s digital assets agenda, including his call for a bitcoin reserve to be set up at the federal level.

As Congress embarked on a two-pronged push into major crypto legislation — the larger effort to institute regulations for the whole crypto industry and a secondary bill to establish oversight for U.S. stablecoin issuers — Williams was on the front lines to work with the relevant congressional offices. It was the stablecoin legislation that caught on first.

“If we can put a regulatory wrapper around it in a way that allows states and bank regulators and all the ecosystems to live in the same rulebook to be an issuer, I think that’s a pretty good outcome for D.C.,” he said at one event in Washington, and a few months later, that goal came to pass. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS) Act became the law of the land, with the Treasury Department among those working on implementing it.

Williams had argued a few weeks into the job that his very existence in the department was a positive sign for the crypto sector, because its needs were now a priority. And he’s had a counterpart at the White House — a crypto point person that was at first Bo Hines but is now Patrick Witt, working underneath crypto czar David Sacks.

They’re the officials directly responsible for ushering in what Trump has promised will be a “golden era” for digital assets.