Most Influential: Bo Hines
President Donald Trump tapped a former college football player to run offense on his digital assets agenda.

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
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.
Bo Hines will be speaking at CoinDesk's upcoming Consensus 2026 conference in Miami in May.
More For You
Protocol Research: GoPlus Security

What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
State of Crypto: Policymakers Dominated Most Influential 2025

CoinDesk is unveiling its annual list of the individuals who have shaped the crypto industry and the discourse around it this year.











