It was a job that didn’t exist before, filled by a person who hadn’t been in government before, but when US President Donald Trump opened a new crypto advisor position in his White House, he brought in a former college football star and aspiring politician to serve as his first executive director of the President’s Council of Digital Asset Advisors.
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Bo Hines, who had been known for his time as a wide receiver at North Carolina State University and Yale before a pair of failed congressional runs, took on a very different role as a sort of cheerleader for Trump’s pro-cryptocurrency policy efforts. He helped David Sacks, the president’s cryptocurrency czar, push several initiatives, including the cryptocurrency industry’s biggest US political 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 achieved federal bitcoin. reserve and on legislation to establish regulations for the broader crypto industry that is still moving through the US Senate, the GENIUS Act was the highlight of his White House tenure.
Hines and his allies made relatively quick progress in the Senate, winning a massive bipartisan vote and quick, equivalent approval from the House of Representatives. He was able to celebrate with the president when Trump signed the bill into law, marking a major accomplishment for his administration.
After that victory, Hines hung his hat in the White House and accepted a job as US CEO of Tether, the stablecoin giant that, in light of the GENIUS Act, had plans to fully enter the US market. Hines was replaced by Patrick Witt, a former McKinsey & Co. executive who also played for the same Yale Bulldogs as a quarterback, and has returned to the same agenda items that Hines had worked on.
