It was a job that didn’t exist before, held by someone who hadn’t been in government before, but when US President Donald Trump opened up a new crypto advisory role in his White House, he brought in a former college football star and up-and-coming politician to serve as his first executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.
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Bo Hines, who had been known for his stints as a wide receiver at North Carolina State University and at Yale before a pair of unsuccessful runs for Congress, took on a very different role as something of a cheerleader for Trump’s pro-crypto policy efforts. He helped David Sacks, the president’s crypto czar, promote various initiatives, including the crypto industry’s biggest US policy success to date: the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act to regulate US stablecoin issuers.
Although he had also worked on the yet-to-be-acquired federal bitcoin caveats and on the legislation to set rules for the broader crypto industry still crawling through the US Senate, the GENIUS Act was the high-water mark of his tenure in the White House.
Hines and his allies managed a relatively quick push through the Senate, pulling a massive bipartisan vote and quick, matching approval from the House of Representatives. He was able to celebrate with the president when Trump signed the bill, marking a major achievement for his administration.
After that victory, Hines hung up his White House hat and took a job as the US chief executive of Tether, the stablecoin giant that — in light of the GENIUS Act — had plans to fully break into the US market. Hines was replaced by Patrick Witt, a former McKinsey & Co. executive who also happens to quarterback the same Yale Bulldogs, and he has brought together the same agenda items that Hines had been working on.
