White House cryptocurrency adviser Bo Hines joins Tether

Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin company, has appointed former White House cryptocurrency adviser Bo Hines, the company said Tuesday morning.

Hines will be helping Tether establish a foothold in the US after stepping down from his role as executive director of the president’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets earlier this month.

A former college football player who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in North Carolina, 29-year-old Hines was tasked with helping the president early in his second term deliver on the major campaign promise he has since reiterated many times to turn the US into the “crypto capital of the world.”

During Hines’s roughly 28 weeks as a White House cryptocurrency adviser, the Trump administration organized the first White House crypto summit, spurred Congress to pass the first bill regulating dollar-pegged stablecoins, and published a policy-setting report on digital assets late last month.

Hines was “instrumental in advancing initiatives to foster innovation in digital assets, develop clear guardrails for stablecoin issuers, and build collaborative relationships between government and the blockchain industry,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in post on X.

As a strategic adviser for Tether’s digital assets and US strategy, Hines will “collaborate closely with Tether’s leadership team to shape and execute the company’s U.S. market entry, cultivating constructive relationships with policymakers and industry stakeholders,” according to Tether’s announcement.

Tether is based in El Salvador. After facing regulatory restrictions from the New York state attorney general and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2021, the company has retreated from the US cryptocurrency market.

Read more: Can you buy crypto with a credit card? See the pros and cons.

Though foreign issuers aren’t permitted to offer stablecoins in the US under new legislation, Ardoino has been sighted visiting the White House this year. He said last month in an interview with Bloomberg TV that Tether’s US strategy is “well in progress.”

“During my time in public service, I witnessed firsthand the transformative potential of stablecoins to modernize payments and increase financial inclusion,” Hines said in a statement attached to Tether’s announcement release. “I’m thrilled to join Tether at such a pivotal moment,” he added.

With big support for the crypto world, President Trump has already pushed the once-niche area of finance into uncharted territory.

Key federal regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller, and the Federal Reserve, have been lifting the barriers between cryptocurrency and the rest of the financial world. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order paving the way for bitcoin and other digital assets to be included in retirement accounts for millions of Americans.

That’s a huge reversal from the more hostile stance taken by these same agencies during the Biden era, which has helped the crypto world boom. It has gained a staggering $1.8 trillion in total market capitalization over the past year, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Read more: Experts advise caution in adding private assets like crypto to 401(k)s

But the crypto industry’s biggest win so far from Trump 2.0 has come from the passage of dollar-pegged stablecoin legislation, which Trump signed into law in July.

Known as the GENIUS Act, this piece of legislation outlines how US companies can issue and manage dollar-backed stablecoins for payments, giving those digital assets a massive stamp of approval that is expected to encourage wider adoption.

One key beneficiary of the new legislation and longtime rival of Tether, Circle (CRCL), issuer of the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USDC (USDC-USD), had a blockbuster IPO on June 5.

Circle has applied for a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Along with fintech firm Stripe (STRI.PVT), Circle recently announced plans to launch its own blockchain for stablecoin payments.

By circulating market capitalization, Tether’s USDT is the most widely used stablecoin, more than twice the size of Circle’s USDC.

Though Tether is far and away the most widely used stablecoin, its critics have alleged that in the past, the company hasn’t offered as much transparency as other issuers.

In October 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged Tether and affiliate exchange Bitfinex with “making untrue or misleading statements and omissions of material fact” for how it backed USDT between 2016 and 2019.

While neither admitting nor denying the wrongdoing, Tether paid $42 million to settle the claim. It has since said that the issues have been addressed.

David Hollerith is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance covering banking, crypto, and other areas in finance.

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