While Bo Hines was running the White House's digital assets council, his consulting firm was collecting money from the company that stood to benefit most from his work. The Wall Street Journal reports that Tether paid roughly $6.3 million to Nxum, a firm Hines co-owned with his father and a business partner, while Hines was helping draft the GENIUS Act — the law that created the first federal rules for dollar stablecoins.
The first payment, $2.49 million routed through Bitfinex, landed in May 2025, while Hines still held his government post. After that, the money kept coming: roughly $415,000 a month, plus extra payments in December 2025 and April 2026. Tether also discussed buying a 25% stake in Nxum for $56 million. In total, Nxum pulled in about $6.3 million.
Trump signed the GENIUS Act in July 2025. Hines left the White House weeks later, and Tether hired him that August to run its new US division — a job he still holds. According to the Journal, Hines pushed to stretch the law's compliance window from 18 to 36 months, a change that gave Tether far more breathing room than smaller American rivals got.
A Nxum representative says Hines didn't know about the Tether arrangement while he was in government and received no Tether-linked money during that period. Nothing in the report proves he broke any law. But the sequence — favorable terms for Tether, then an exit from government, then a Tether paycheck — is exactly the pattern critics have warned about: the people writing crypto rules ending up on the payroll of the companies those rules were meant to govern.
