Bill Hagerty Billionaires & Big BusinessCorruption & Ethics Tennessee

Bill Hagerty Wrote the Crypto Industry's Law. Thirteen Days After It Passed, Their CEOs Wrote Him Checks.

Hagerty authored the GENIUS Act, the first federal crypto law. It says in its own text that stablecoins get no FDIC insurance. Within two weeks of Senate passage, the CEOs of Coinbase and Ripple maxed out to his campaign.

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Bill Hagerty Wrote the Crypto Industry's Law. Thirteen Days After It Passed, Their CEOs Wrote Him Checks.

On June 17, 2025, the U.S. Senate passed a bill called the GENIUS Act by a vote of 68 to 30. It was the first major federal law written for the cryptocurrency industry, and it created the rulebook for a product called a stablecoin — a digital token meant to hold a steady value, usually one dollar.

The senator who wrote that bill is Bill Hagerty of Tennessee.

Nine days after the Senate passed his bill, the CEO of Coinbase — the biggest crypto exchange in America — wrote a check to Hagerty's campaign. Four days after that, so did the CEO of Ripple, another major crypto company, along with a Coinbase vice president.

Thirteen days. Three executives. $13,300.

That's not a coincidence you have to squint at. It's in the public record, filed with the Federal Election Commission.

He didn't just vote for it. He wrote it.

This is the part that separates Hagerty from the other 67 senators who voted yes.

On February 4, 2025, Hagerty introduced the GENIUS Act with three colleagues. His own office called it legislation he was leading. In the announcement, he said the bill "establishes a safe and pro-growth regulatory framework that will unleash innovation," and that "from enhancing transaction efficiency to driving demand for U.S. Treasuries, the potential benefits of strong stablecoin innovation are immense."

Hagerty sits on the Senate Banking Committee — the committee that decides how financial products get regulated in this country. So he wasn't a backbencher casting a vote on someone else's idea. He was the author, working the committee that had jurisdiction over his own bill.

President Trump signed it into law on July 18, 2025.

What the law actually says about your money

Here is the sentence most people never read. It's in the final text of Hagerty's own bill:

"Payment stablecoins shall not be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, guaranteed by the United States Government, subject to deposit insurance by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or subject to share insurance by the National Credit Union Administration."

Read that again, because it matters.

When you put money in a bank, the FDIC insures it. If the bank fails, you get your money back — up to $250,000, guaranteed by the United States government. That protection is why ordinary people can keep their savings somewhere other than under a mattress.

A stablecoin looks like a dollar. It's named to sound like a dollar. It's marketed as being as good as a dollar. And under the law Hagerty wrote, it carries none of a dollar's protection. If the company holding the reserves goes under, there is no federal backstop. You are an unsecured creditor in a bankruptcy, standing in line.

The financial watchdog group Better Markets has laid out why that's dangerous: "Unlike bank deposits, stablecoins carry no federal insurance." And because these tokens can be cashed out around the clock, the group warns they "reward whoever runs first" — meaning the moment anyone doubts the reserves are real, everyone races for the exit at once, and the slowest people lose. That's a bank run, minus the insurance that was invented to stop bank runs.

These aren't hypothetical worries. Stablecoins have broken their promise before — the token TerraUSD collapsed entirely in 2022, wiping out the people holding it.

Then came the checks

Now look at the timeline against the money. All of these are individual contributions from the executives themselves, reported to the FEC by Hagerty's own campaign committee.

The Senate passed the GENIUS Act on June 17, 2025.

Five months later, on December 3, 2025, Coinbase president Emilie Choi added $6,365.

Zoom out and the pattern is bigger than those two weeks. People who work at Coinbase have given Hagerty's campaign $31,400. Ripple's CEO gave $6,600. Partners at Andreessen Horowitz — the venture capital firm that is one of crypto's biggest financial backers — gave $22,600, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz themselves. Coinbase's corporate PAC chipped in another $5,000.

That's more than $65,000 from the industry whose federal rulebook he personally wrote.

The revolving door spins here too. A Washington Examiner investigation into crypto's lobbying push found that former staffers from a handful of key Senate offices had gone to work for crypto firms — reporting that "former staffers from the offices of key senators on the banking and agricultural committees — among them Sens. John Thune (R-SD), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — were also retained by crypto firms to plead their cases."

Who got protected, and who didn't

We've seen this exact shape before. Nebraska's Mike Flood wrote his state's crypto banking law, and the company that landed America's first digital asset bank charter under it planted itself in his hometown — its CEO one of his biggest donors. Different state, different chamber, same arrangement: write the rules for an industry, then collect from the industry you wrote them for.

And the rules keep getting friendlier. Since the law passed, federal regulators have been writing the fine print, and the American Prospect reported in June 2026 that the crypto industry got what it wanted — regulators fast-tracking charters for stablecoin issuers including Ripple, Circle, and Crypto.com, alongside President Trump's own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. The comptroller overseeing it explained the new posture plainly: "We don't have a zero risk tolerance anymore."

So the president's family business is one of the companies regulated by the framework, and the framework's author is a senator from Tennessee taking money from the industry it governs.

Meanwhile, nothing in Hagerty's law requires a stablecoin issuer to tell you plainly, at the moment you buy, that the thing in your hand isn't insured. It bars companies from claiming federal insurance — but that's not the same as making sure people understand they don't have it.

Tennesseans are not, by and large, crypto executives. They're people getting pitched a product that looks like a savings account and isn't one. The senator who decided how much protection they'd get is the same senator whose campaign the industry's CEOs funded within two weeks of his bill clearing the Senate.

He's not done

Hagerty is now pushing the next one. On August 4, 2026, on Fox Business, he pressed the Senate to move the CLARITY Act — a broader bill setting the rules for crypto markets. "We have to pass the CLARITY Act," he said. "I think we should put it through a vote on the floor of the United States Senate and find out where Democrats stand."

He's also on the ballot himself. Hagerty ran unopposed in Tennessee's Republican primary, and on August 6, 2026 Memphis environmental advocate Marquita Bradshaw won the Democratic nomination, setting up a rematch of the 2020 race he won by 27 points.

Before that vote, it's worth asking a simple question about the last one: when Bill Hagerty sat down to write the rules for a brand-new kind of money, whose interests was he protecting — the people who'd be holding it, or the people who'd be issuing it?

The law he wrote answers that. So does the calendar.

Sources

Bill Hagerty Report Card

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