Kevin Hassett, the White House official steering economic policy for President Trump, held between $1 million and $5 million in Coinbase stock at the end of 2025, according to a financial disclosure released this week, while the council he runs drove the administration’s rewrite of cryptocurrency rules. The disclosure, first reported by CNBC, lists the shares as vested stock from Hassett’s earlier role as an adviser to Coinbase, a seat he held from 2021 until January 2025, when he joined the White House. The filing also shows $50,001 in salary from Coinbase’s Academic and Regulatory Advisory Council, where he served alongside former SEC Chair Jay Clayton and former CIA General Counsel Courtney Elwood.
The job and the stock overlap
Hassett runs the National Economic Council, the office Trump tasked three days after taking office with drafting the digital assets agenda: deregulation, a government bitcoin reserve, stablecoin rules and tax reform. The council coordinates crypto policy across the Treasury Department, the SEC and the CFTC, which puts its director at the center of every major rule the industry has lobbied for this term.
The stock was not a secret. Bloomberg reported in June 2025 that Hassett disclosed a Coinbase stake worth at least $1 million, with total reported assets of at least $7.6 million. What the new filing adds is timing: the shares were still held on December 31, 2025, months into the crypto policy push, and the disclosure does not confirm whether he has sold since. Financial disclosures of this kind are filed annually and lag reality by design, so the end-2025 snapshot says nothing certain about today.
Hassett has said he stays out of crypto matters. In a statement, he said he consulted government ethics officials after joining the administration and has avoided cryptocurrency-related work as a result. Robin Colwell has handled the crypto portfolio in his place on the policy committee. The White House points to that arrangement as the safeguard.
Ethics lawyers see a problem anyway
A former SEC ethics lawyer told CNBC the holding amounts to a “significant conflict of interest,” or at least creates the appearance of one. The sharper argument is practical: crypto policy was a core priority of the administration, and a director who recuses himself from it cannot do the coordinating job he was appointed to do. Recusal, in this view, trades one problem for another.
The disclosure ranges also blunt precision. Federal filings bracket asset values in broad bands, so the stake could be $1 million or $5 million, and no share count is given. Coinbase shares have moved sharply through 2026 as regulation of the industry tightened and loosened by turns, which means the value of the position, and whatever conflicts flow from it, is not static. An observer cannot even say whether the holding grew or shrank between the June 2025 report and this one without more granular data that the filing does not provide.
What the NEC actually touched
The council’s crypto footprint is broad. It shaped the working group that produced recommendations on stablecoin issuance and banking access for digital asset firms, and it sits upstream of the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill the Senate is set to vote on Tuesday with passage odds sliding. Any of those decisions moves Coinbase’s business directly, from listing exposure to custody economics.
Coinbase, for its part, has benefited from the policy direction. The exchange’s stock drew fresh attention this week after the disclosure, and the company has been expanding into bank settlement and stablecoin infrastructure, including a program announced this week to bring stablecoin acceptance to more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions. Hassett advised the company through a period when it courted Washington heavily, hiring former regulators to its advisory council as the 2024 election approached.
Ethics rules for executive branch employees bar acting on matters with a direct effect on financial holdings, which is what the recusal addresses. They do not require divestiture, only disclosure and recusal from specific matters. That leaves the arrangement legal and, to critics, unsatisfying at the same time. Some administrations have handled comparable situations with blind trusts or forced sales; this one has relied on recusal alone, at least on the public record.
Officials holding stock in industries they oversee is not new, and disclosure is the designed remedy. The recurring question is where recusal ends. Hassett’s office touches nearly every economic file, and crypto now intersects with banking rules, tax policy and market structure. Each new proposal forces a fresh judgment about whether it counts as a crypto matter he must avoid. A tariff decision, a Treasury market intervention or a banking rule can all have secondary effects on an exchange’s business, and none of those would obviously trigger the recusal.
The political timing is awkward too. The Senate’s Tuesday vote on the CLARITY Act is the biggest crypto legislative moment of the year, and the administration’s position on it has been the subject of lobbying from every direction. An NEC director on the sidelines of that fight, by design, is an unusual posture for an office built to coordinate exactly this kind of cross-agency work.
The filing leaves the immediate questions unanswered: whether Hassett still holds the shares in 2026, and whether the Office of Government Ethics reviewed the arrangement beyond the initial consultation. Neither the White House nor Coinbase has said it plans divestiture. Watch groups have already flagged the disclosure, and the pattern that followed similar cases in past administrations suggests the pressure will be for a sale or a trust, not a broader recusal that would hollow out the job.