A Trump White House crypto adviser's family business quietly collected millions from a company with everything riding on the law he was shepherding.
Bo Hines, who led the Trump administration's push for the Genius Act stablecoin law, kept a one-third stake in his consulting firm Nxum while Tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer, steered millions of dollars its way, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Once the law passed, Tether hired Hines to run its new U.S. division.
According to The Journal, Nxum has taken in $6.3 million from a Tether deal brokered in May 2025, with the first payment arriving while Hines was still working to finalize the bill. Hines co-founded the firm with his father, Todd Hines, and marketing executive Gary Dennis.
Signal messages reviewed by The Journal show Hines stayed in a group chat with his partners while in the White House, relaying legislative updates and talking points as his partners communicated with Tether's CEO. When GOP holdouts stalled the bill in the House, Hines urged his partners to paint them as "bought and paid for by democratic shills."
His father, who told Dennis he had gotten a "very worried" call from Tether's chief, responded, "let's start knocking heads."
Hines also pushed lawmakers to double the bill's compliance window to three years, a change that chiefly benefited Tether, according to people involved in the talks.
"Bo got it done," Dennis told an associate after President Donald Trump struck a deal with the holdouts.
A Nxum representative told The Journal that Hines had no knowledge of or role in the firm's Tether business while he served, received no Tether-linked money during that time and held only a "passive investment" that ethics rules didn't force him to sell.
Cynthia Brown, a senior ethics counsel at the watchdog group CREW, told The Journal that federal law generally bars officials from working on matters in which they hold a financial stake.
Tether did not respond to The Journal's requests for comment.
