After shepherding through President Donald Trump’s ambitious blockchain agenda, the 29-year-old Bo Hines announced last week that he was stepping down from his senior White House position after almost seven months. Not surprisingly, private sector companies are now jostling to add Hines to their ranks.  

In an interview with Fortune from a Times Square hotel, where Hines was staying as he traversed New York City for a day of meetings and job interviews, the former Yale wide receiver said that he’s already received more than 50 job offers since he officially vacated his role last Friday. He is seriously considering five, all in the crypto sector, with no immediate plans to return to a political career, he said. 

At the White House, Hines helped notched an array of accomplishments, including a stablecoin bill signed into law and a series of blockchain-related executive orders, but his decision to leave marked an abrupt end to his short-lived tenure in the Trump administration.

“Coming out of a public servant role, I care deeply about still positioning the U.S. to be the leader here,” Hines said. “Entering back in the private sector, I feel as if I can still have a large impact on how all this unfolds over the course of the next decade.”

The crypto capital

Before Hines started as the new administration’s executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets back in January, Hines was a relative unknown on the national political scene. 

He had unsuccessfully run as a Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina twice and cofounded an investment firm called Nxum Capital with his father, Todd Hines, and another partner. Bo Hines steered the operation’s political unit, leading one of its investments—an “anti-woke” media organization called Today is America that partnered with get-out-the-vote efforts for the Trump campaign. Nxum also donated $1 million worth of billboard advertisements to MAGA Inc., one of the largest Trump-supporting super PACs.  

Though Hines dabbled in crypto, an interest he picked up after playing in the college football 2014 Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl, he became one of the highest-profile figures in the industry following Trump’s appointment. The new president had promised to implement a blockchain-friendly agenda, choosing Hines and venture investor David Sacks to lead the initiative. 

In his role, Hines met with dozens of blockchain leaders from companies like Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple, and Bank of New York Mellon, serving as a bridge between the private sector, Congress, and various agencies. Speaking from the Midtown Manhattan hotel at 10 a.m. with a lemon-lime Celsius in hand, Hines joked that the energy drink fueled the White House’s crypto agenda, which has already produced new stablecoin legislation and a Bitcoin strategic reserve.

“My number one objective was to deliver on the president’s promise to make the U.S. the crypto capital world,” Hines told Fortune. “I think for the most part, we’re there.” 

Still, he acknowledged that the work is not yet done. Congress is still debating wide-ranging legislation that would establish further regulations for how crypto markets operate. (He declined to give a percentage chance that it would pass, saying he thought “they will get it done.”) Patrick Witt, who played quarterback at Yale before Hines started at the university and served as Hines’ deputy in the White House, is taking over his role. 

Next steps

Given his high-profile Trump administration role, Hines will have his pick of jobs coming out of the public sector. He told Fortune he’s not planning to return full-time to Nxum Capital, though he remains on the cap table and will “contribute when necessary.” He also ruled out running for a North Carolina Senate seat after Republican Thom Tillis announced he would not seek reelection, noting that Trump is already supporting Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley. 

While Hines will stay on in the White House as a special employee—a part-time role—he will only focus on artificial intelligence and not touch crypto. That allows him to pursue a career in the sector. He declined to name the companies he’s considering working for, only adding that he’s hoping to have “clarity” in the next week or so and is pursuing executive-level roles. 

For now, he’s planning to spend more time in his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife and young son and keep a less chaotic schedule. “I can now actually exercise again,” he joked to Fortune, “instead of just intermittent fasting all day.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Bitcoin boomed—and then tumbled. The world’s largest cryptocurrency hit another all-time high Wednesday evening, surging past $124,100, according to data from Binance. But, since notching a new record, the token has dropped 5% and now hovers below $118,000.

Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is also hovering near all-time highs but is down 4% over the past 24 hours at about $4,500, per Binance. Still, the token’s price has soared over the past month to increase by almost 50%.

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has dropped almost 4% over the past day to around $4.07 trillion, according to CoinGecko, and the S&P 500 is slightly down Thursday since markets last closed.

Bitcoin’s Wednesday surge followed a bout of optimism about the prospect of rate cuts in September from the Federal Reserve. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only a moderate increase in inflation in July of 2.7%. Analysts soon predicted that September rate cuts—which would likely prompt investors to take money out of U.S. Treasuries and put them into riskier bets like Bitcoin—were almost a given, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool.

“The near certainty of U.S. interest rate cuts lifts risk appetite and pressures the dollar,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at IG, a UK-based financial firm.

But, on Thursday morning, the BLS reported a worrying price increase in July of 0.9% in goods made by U.S. producers. It was the biggest increase since June 2022, and the crypto market dipped along with the news.

“The recent pullback in crypto prices following a hotter-than-forecast reading on core CPI seems to have shaken broader confidence in a Fed rate cut next month,” said Thomas Perfumo, global economist for Kraken, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the U.S.

Kyle Chasse, founder and chairman of the crypto venture firm MV Global, echoed Perfumo. “This spooks people,” he said of Thursday’s BLS report.

Despite the pullback, the crypto market is still near all-time highs. The total market capitalization continues to hover over $4 trillion, a mark it crossed for the first time in July amid a boom in the stock market and crypto-friendly policies from President Donald Trump.

Correction, August 14, 2025: A previous version of this article misquoted Thomas Perfumo.

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Another Wall Street executive is defecting to the crypto industry. Mustafa Al Niama, the former head of the Americas digital assets desk for the investment bank Goldman Sachs, is joining the blockchain developer Mysten Labs as head of capital markets, he told Fortune. He’ll help lead the crypto company’s outreach to large financial institutions, he said.

“The objective is to expand that sphere materially more than what we have today,” Al Niama added.

He’s the latest from the world of Wall Street to join an industry populated not so long ago by teens and twentysomethings in hoodies. Others include Mary-Catherine Lader, a former rising star at asset manager BlackRock who jumped ship in 2021 to join Uniswap Labs. There’s also Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange who joined the crypto exchange Bullish as CEO in 2023. 

The flow of Wall Street executives into crypto mirrors the increasing integration of two sectors that were once thought to be opposites. Large banks like JPMorgan Chase are experimenting with issuing digital tokens meant to represent one dollar of deposits. And other institutions are exploring how to tokenize money-market funds, or put financial assets into blockchain wrappers.

Al Niama already has experience sitting between Wall Street and crypto. He spent four years at American Express before he switched over to Goldman Sachs in 2015, where he eventually worked his way up to becoming a regional head on the firm’s digital assets desk. One of the initiatives he led was a collaboration announced in July between Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York, or BNY, to launch tokenized money market funds.

Now, he’s joining one of the deepest-pocketed firms in crypto. Founded by former engineers from Meta’s scuttled stablecoin project Libra, Mysten Labs has raised about $336 million from prominent firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Franklin Templeton, according to Pitchbook. (The company also raised significant sums from the venture arm of the failed crypto exchange FTX but bought back the stake after FTX declared bankruptcy.)

Mysten Labs is the main developer behind the Sui blockchain, which uses some of the tech that engineers at Meta had once developed for the social media giant’s crypto moonshot.

“Hiring Mustafa as head of capital markets is the next step towards helping the ecosystem bring Sui’s mainstream public blockchain to institutional finance,” Ryan Servatius, global head of partnerships at Mysten Labs, said in a statement to Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Building blockchains is the newest fad in fintech. The U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase has one. The online brokerage Robinhood announced its plans to launch its own blockchain in June, and its competitor eToro is considering its own. And now, the fintech giant Stripe and the stablecoin issuer Circle are getting in on the action.

Stripe is developing what it calls Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain, according to a since-deleted job posting and sources familiar with the matter. And Circle said Tuesday morning that it’s building what it calls Arc, a blockchain designed for stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar.

There’s suddenly a flood of corporate chains, which prompts the question: Why is seemingly every big finance company—especially Stripe and Circle—becoming a blockchain developer?

‘Own the full stack’

The answer for Stripe is simple, according to two stablecoin executives and one investor: vertical integration. 

Through its $1.1 billion acquisition of the stablecoin startup Bridge, Stripe bought its own stablecoin and payments network. And after its June acquisition of the crypto wallet company Privy, it can give users accounts to store stablecoins. For, Stripe—which has made its name off of more traditional payment offerings like online checkout—adding a blockchain would amount to the creation of a full-blown stablecoin ecosystem.

“There’s an incentive for these large companies to own the full stack,” Rob Hadick, general partner at the crypto venture firm Dragonfly who regularly invests in stablecoin startups, told Fortune.

Stripe is making a big bet that stablecoins may be the future of payments. If much of its $1.4 trillion volume passes through stablecoins, it’s missing out on potentially millions in revenue.

Blockchains, or decentralized networks like Ethereum or Solana, are akin to the Google Cloud or AWS of the crypto tech stack. A decentralized fleet of servers process many of the transactions on a crypto app, and in return for lending their computing power, the owners of these servers receive fees.

Coinbase’s own blockchain, Base, for example, has generated more than $130 million in fees since it launched in early 2023, according to data from DefiLlama. 

“You want to control the economics,” Luca Prosperi, cofounder and CEO of stablecoin infrastructure company M0, told Fortune.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the multiplication of stablecoins and associated blockchains will result in countless coins and chains that normal consumers would have trouble navigating.

Stripe didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Defense vs. offense

For Circle, it’s a similar set of motivations. 

The stablecoin issuer, which had a red-hot IPO in June, has its own token, USDC. The company also has its own burgeoning payments network. And it even has a service to let enterprise customers spin up their own crypto wallets. Still, the crypto company doesn’t have its own blockchain where it can process—and receive fees—for the volume of payments that pass through its services.

“They want to own that piece of money movement as well,” Bam Azizi, cofounder and CEO of crypto payments startup Mesh, told Fortune, in reference to Circle.

But Stripe and Circle aren’t on the same footing. Stripe is one of the biggest private companies in tech. It’s a dominant payments processor whose revenue is already diversified—including $500 million in annual revenue run rate as of January from its Stripe Billing vertical.

Circle, on the other hand, derived more than 96% of its revenue in the second quarter of 2025 purely from the interest it earns on the U.S. Treasuries backing its stablecoin. If interest rates go down, its entire business model could be threatened. 

“We’re building a full stack, from the infrastructure layer to the stablecoin layer to the payment network layer,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a live interview with The Information about his company’s second-quarter earnings. (A spokesperson for Circle declined to comment further.)

That said, some think the newly public company is playing catch-up.

“Circle is being defensive and reactive,” said Hadick, the general partner at Dragonfly. “And Stripe is thinking about the future of payments and the future of their business, and being offensive and proactive.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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As Stripe pushes further into crypto with its planned blockchain Tempo, the fintech giant is getting a heavyweight to lead the project. Matt Huang, the cofounder and managing partner at the influential crypto venture firm Paradigm, will serve as Tempo’s first CEO, according to three sources familiar with the project. Huang is already a Stripe board member.

Huang will stay in his role at Paradigm, according to one of the sources, who, like the others, was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly.

Spokespeople for Paradigm and Stripe declined to comment on Huang’s decision or the blockchain project.

A $91.5 billion private company, Stripe is a leader in the payments space and represents one of the highest-profile Big Tech companies to bet heavily on the crypto industry. Over the past year, it made splashy acquisitions of the stablecoin firm Bridge and the crypto wallet provider Privy. By launching its own blockchain, Stripe seeks full ownership of the tech stack powering its burgeoning stablecoin business. 

Cofounded by Huang, a former Sequoia partner, along with Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam, Paradigm is a leader in the crypto venture space. As of 2024, it had $12.7 billion in assets under management and has backed some of the industry’s top projects, including the decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap, the prediction market Kalshi, and the crypto infrastructure company Fireblocks. 

Through his role on Stripe’s board, Huang has long been a close partner to the fintech firm, but his decision to lead the new blockchain represents a major bet on Stripe’s future dominance in the crowded stablecoin landscape. According to a recent job posting, Tempo will be a “high-performance” protocol that specializes in payments. 

Tempo will be a so-called layer-1 blockchain, meaning it is not constructed atop the blockchain Ethereum or other primary chain, and will be able to run code compatible with Ethereum, according to four sources familiar with the project. The timing of the launch is unknown, and it’s unclear for now whether the blockchain will have its own token. 

Huang’s move will surely raise eyebrows from those in the venture space who question whether the venture investor can balance his roles as the leader of Paradigm and the CEO of an upstart blockchain for one of the premier fintech companies.

Ehrsam, Huang’s cofounder, stepped down from his role as managing partner in 2023 to focus more on his brain interface startup Nudge, though he remains as a general partner. Alana Palmedo also serves as managing partner. Paradigm announced an $850 million third fund in 2024. 

Still, Paradigm has a legacy of incubating its own projects similar to Tempo, including the Ethereum development toolbox Foundry and the open-source crypto bot Artemis. But with top crypto players, including Circle, announcing their own blockchains, Huang’s move to lead Paradigm’s latest company reflects the mounting competition in crypto payments.

Updated to include Alana Palmedo’s role as managing partner.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The fintech giant Stripe is developing a new blockchain, according to a recent job posting on a site for the crypto lobby group Blockchain Association. “Tempo is a high-performance, payments-focused blockchain,” reads the job advertisement, which is for a product marketing position and dated Aug. 3. 

The posting goes on to say that Tempo is in stealth, has a team of five, and is being built in partnership with Paradigm—a crypto venture capital firm whose cofounder and managing partner, Matt Huang, is on the board of Stripe. Applicants for the marketing position should have “experience marketing to a Fortune 500 audience,” per the ad.

The blockchain is a layer 1, or not built on top of other protocols, and it’s compatible with the coding language used on the blockchain Ethereum, according to four sources briefed on the matter. All sources requested anonymity to talk about private business conversations. 

Spokespeople for Stripe and Paradigm declined to comment. The job posting was taken down after Fortune reached out to both companies.

Tempo is the latest bet on crypto from Stripe, which has grown to an almost $92 billion valuation on the back of payment products like easy online checkout and automated invoicing for businesses. 

In October, Stripe announced it was paying $1.1 billion for the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, its largest acquisition to date. And in June, the payments titan said it bought the crypto wallet developer Privy. (It didn’t disclose the price.) 

Stripe’s crypto shopping spree comes amid a rush of interest in stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. Boosters say the crypto assets are a more effective payment technology than legacy financial infrastructure like SWIFT or wires. They also argue that the technology can reduce cross-border payment costs as well as cut down on transaction fees, among other benefits. 

Although stablecoins have existed for more than a decade, broader interest in the technology has picked up steam over the past year, especially after President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July. The bill outlines federal regulatory guidance and rules for the burgeoning sector of crypto.

Stablecoins have become such a buzzy subject in the world of payments that even Big Tech giants like Meta, Apple, and Airbnb are exploring stablecoin integrations—but Stripe is leading the charge. “We are now seeing meaningful business interest in stablecoins as the underlying technology has matured,” Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe, said in testimony to the House in March.

Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge gives the fintech ownership of a platform that helps companies integrate stablecoins into their payment flows and issue their own. And its purchase of Privy gives it the ability to build out crypto wallets for customers to help them manage their holdings. A new blockchain would allow it to control another layer in the stablecoin tech stack—the servers that process stablecoin transactions.

Stripe hasn’t publicly stated its reasons for building a blockchain. It also hasn’t said it intends to issue a cryptocurrency to support it—a common move for founders of a new crypto protocol.

Update, Aug. 11, 2025: This article has been updated to note that the job posting has since been taken down after Fortune reached out to Stripe and Paradigm for comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The crypto markets keep roaring. The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies notched a new all-time high of almost $4.15 trillion early Monday morning, according to data from CoinGecko. That beats the last record set in late July. The total value of the crypto market has since dipped but is still up almost 0.6% over the past 24 hours. 

Among the top tokens, Ethereum is the biggest gainer. The world’s second largest cryptocurrency crossed the threshold of $4,000 over the weekend for the first time since December. The token is up over 2% in the past 24 hours and now trades at around $4,300, according to data from Binance. 

Ethereum’s surge outpaces Bitcoin’s, but the world’s largest cryptocurrency is still up 1.4% over the past day to cross the $120,000 mark, per Binance. The stock markets are essentially flat, with the S&P 500 slightly up since Monday morning.

The surge in the digital assets market comes amid two crypto-friendly executive orders from President Donald Trump. 

On Thursday, the 47th president instructed federal regulators to reevaluate their guidance on the allowance of alternative assets like crypto or private equity into employer-sponsored retirement plans. 

The measure essentially reinstated a similar order Trump had issued in 2020 during his first term that Preisdent Joe Biden rolled back when he assumed office.

Still, crypto industry analysts hailed last week’s executive order as a potential windfall for the industry. Assets in 401(k)s totaled $8.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2025, according to the Investment Company Institute.

On the same day that Trump potentially opened up 401(k)s to crypto, he also tackled one more pet issue for the digital assets industry. In an executive order, he instructed financial institutions to stop the practice of “debanking” of customers based on their politics, religious beliefs, or business activities.

The crypto industry has long decried banks’ shuttering of their accounts, and some have alleged that there was a centralized conspiracy, known as Operation Chokepoint 2.0, to deny crypto businesses access to traditional financial institutions. Still, there hasn’t been a smoking gun, or discrete guidance from regulators that instructed banks to stop working with crypto firms.

Regardless, industry advocates cheered on the president’s order on debanking.

“Operation Chokepoint 2.0 was real,” Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer at the crypto exchange Coinbase, posted Thursday on X. “And now we see real action taken to fix it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The Trump family’s crypto business World Liberty Financial is using a publicly-listed company, ALT5 Sigma Corporation, to raise $1.5 billion for the purchase of its WLFI token. In a press release on Monday, ALT5 Sigma announced that it would sell a combination of 200 million new and existing shares and use the proceeds to buy the Trump family token.

The move represents an effort by the Trump family to capitalize on a recent trend of using either small publicly traded or blank-check companies to let a broader swathe of traders gain exposure to cryptocurrencies.

The strategy was first popularized by Michael Saylor, who renamed his decades-old software company MicroStrategy to Strategy as he transformed it into a Bitcoin behemoth. He and company executives began adding billions of dollars in Bitcoin to the balance sheet for the firm, which prompted traders to see the company’s stock as a proxy for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. Strategy’s market capitalization soon soared along with Bitcoin’s rise.

Now, a flood of other copycats have entered the market. In addition to Bitcoin, there are treasury companies for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Sui, Ethena, and now WLFI. All pitch their companies’ stock as a proxy for the cryptocurrencies they hold and a way for traditional investors to gain exposure to crypto.

“One small step for mankind, one giant leap for WLFI,” said the X account for World Liberty Financial, announcing the raise.

Zach Witkoff, the CEO of World Liberty and son of President Donald Trump’s Steve Witkoff, will become chairman of the board of directors at ALT5 Sigma. Eric Trump, son of the president and cofounder of World Liberty, will also join the board, and Zak Folkman, the crypto company’s COO, will become a board observer. 

World Liberty was the lead investor in the raise. Other investors weren’t disclosed. A spokesperson for World Liberty Financial declined to comment.

World Liberty Financial’s move into the public markets is the Trump family’s latest expansion of its crypto empire. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have their own memecoins. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have not only backed World Liberty but also spun up their own Bitcoin mining firm.

And Trump Media and Technology, the publicly traded company that encompasses Trump’s social media site Truth Social, has also recently pivoted to crypto and added $2 billion in Bitcoin to its balance sheet.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The Trump family business World Liberty Financial is planning to announce a crypto treasury company, say three investors who have seen parts of the deal. The plan, according to details shopped around to investors and viewed by Fortune, revolves around a publicly traded company that would hold a combination of World Liberty’s proprietary token WLFI and cash. 

The proposal also calls for Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. to serve on the board, and hopes to raise $1.5 billion to fund the new company.

If the plan goes forward, it would be the latest addition to the Trump family’s fast-growing crypto empire. The Trump family first announced the World Liberty crypto project last fall, launching a series of products including the WLFI token, which has netted $550 million in sales, as well as its own stablecoin, USD1. 

A spokesperson for World Liberty declined to comment. Spokespeople for Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment.

The planned treasury company comes amid a boom in so-called “digital asset treasury companies,” or publicly traded firms that hold large stashes of cryptocurrency on their balance sheets. According to details shared with investors, the planned treasury company for World Liberty’s token is a shell firm that is already listed on the NASDAQ, and that it has already acquired.

The concept of crypto treasury companies was pioneered by billionaire Michael Saylor, who remade his software company MicroStrategy into a vehicle to acquire Bitcoin in 2020 then renamed it Strategy in 2025. Traders soon saw the company’s stock as a proxy for the world’s largest cryptocurrency, and bought up its shares as Bitcoin’s price increased.

For Strategy, the tactic proved so successful that it went on to accumulate more than $72 billion worth of the cryptocurrency and reached a market capitalization of almost $113 billion, despite reporting only $115 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2025.

Crypto investors saw the boom in Strategy’s valuation and followed suit. Early copycats included a budget hotel company in Japan, which began adding Bitcoin in 2024, as well as a handful of other companies that joined the trend later that year.

But this year, the practice has accelerated. There are now treasury companies for Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. There are also others for a growing number of cryptocurrencies, including Litecoin, Sui, and Ethena. Meanwhile, another Trump family venture, Trump Media, bought $2 billion of Bitcoin earlier this summer for its own treasury. 

Advocates say the treasury companies let traditional investors, who may be constrained by what they can trade through brokerages like Vanguard, trade cryptocurrencies and gain exposure to the digital assets market.

But an increasing number of investors have warned that the trend is a fad and say many of these companies may be at risk of collapse as the current crypto boom subsides.

Aside from World Liberty Financial, which promises to launch different decentralized financial applications built around its token and stablecoin, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have both launched their own memecoins. Eric and Donald Jr. are also deeply involved in the blockchain industry, including their backing of a Bitcoin mining company.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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