I am the managing partner of Byrne & Storm, P.C. I act as outside general counsel for entrepreneurs in cutting-edge technology spheres, with particular foci in cryptocurrency, social media, and AI. My work typically involves assisting businesses with day-to-day commercial law issues including corporate formations, commercial contracts, venture capital raises, and commercial disputes.
Past and present clients include companies focusing on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency sale and exchange, L1 and L2 network protocol development companies, social media, censorship-resistant communications, artificial intelligence, gaming, and SaaS, including in many cases family offices/funds investing in these areas and their portfolio companies. I am not accepting new clients at this time.
In my free time I’m a legal fellow of the Adam Smith Institute where, lately, my research interests have focused on free speech and related technology regulation, and also an adjunct professor of law at Fordham Law School in New York City, where I teach cryptocurrency law and practice. Previously, I worked as a securitization lawyer in BigLaw in London, England.
I also co-founded and was COO and general counsel of early enterprise blockchain startup Monax. Monax forked Ethereum proof-of-concept version 3 to build the first Ethereum DAO prototype and the first permissioned blockchain client, in both cases in 2014. The design later evolved into the Apache-licensed Hyperledger Burrow permissioned Ethereum blockchain node. Burrow was the Hyperledger Project’s first Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and was used by Intel and IBM’s contributions to that project, respectively named Sawtooth Lake and Fabric, to run EVMs on those codebases.
This here is my personal website, together with a blog about law, politics, distributed systems, and whatever else I happen to be thinking about. I’m also a superfan of marmots, so don’t be surprised if one turns up in a blog post.