Most Influential: Sen. Bill Hagerty

When U.S. President Donald Trump signed the first major piece of legislation primarily addressing crypto issues into law in July 2025, it was only the final step in a years-long campaign to have lawmakers craft dedicated rules for the crypto industry. The president’s signature on July 18, 2025 kicked off a new process by federal regulators to define specific regulations and explain how they would enforce those regulations around stablecoins, which itself is only a small segment of the broader overall crypto market.

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

Sen. Bill Hagerty, a Republican representing Tennessee, introduced the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act — better known as the GENIUS Act — in February, kicking off the process for a law that set rules for stablecoin issuers wanting to do business in the U.S. and directed federal bank and financial regulators to get to work creating specific guidelines for these firms.

To be sure, Hagerty is among a group of lawmakers which included both Republicans and Democrats who drafted the bill, voted it out of committee, pushed it through the Senate and ultimately through the House of Representatives (which originally had its own stablecoin bill which was eventually dropped in favor of the Senate draft).

In remarks at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas earlier this year, Hagerty called the bill the most bipartisan product the Senate Banking Committee had produced in a decade.

“It’s taken a tremendous amount of work,” he said on the panel a few months prior to the bill’s passage. He argued that the bill would reduce counterparty risk, cut transaction costs and lower the working capital necessary for operating accounts receivables.

“If I think about the major selling points to my colleagues, the cost savings, the efficiencies, that’s all good,” he said about the bill. “But if you think about what this does for dollar dominance around the world, the dollar has been the reserve currency of the world, and we've seen a slow degradation of that. This is going to turn the tables on this and move us right back to the fore.”

Stablecoins, already a rapidly growing part of the crypto market, continue to see new issuers enter the market and are anticipated to reach a nearly $2 trillion market cap by the end of the decade, according to some analyses.