I am the managing partner of Byrne & Storm, P.C. and Head of Legal at Defuse Labs.
For nearly two decades, I have worked at the intersection of international regulation and emerging technologies, as a founder, attorney, think tank fellow, law professor, and executive.
For my day job, I build and fix fintech compliance programs and advise on commercial law issues. In my free time, I am a digital rights and free speech lawyer.
I’m a Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute where, lately, my research interests have focused on free speech and related technology regulation. I am also on the Legal Advisory Council of the UK Free Speech Union.
My free speech work includes defending numerous U.S. technology companies from domestic and foreign censorship for nearly a decade. I have defended Americans against attempts to censor or chill constitutionally protected speech online by public bodies acting under the authority of numerous countries and international organizations, including, but not limited to, the United States, the UK, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brazil.
I quarterbacked the defense, pro bono, of every American enforcement target of the UK Online Safety Act in 2025, which included filing a federal lawsuit against the UK Office of Communications in D.C. federal court.
As part of this defense work, in October 2025, I created the GRANITE Act foreign Internet censorship shield law concept. GRANITE is designed to completely solve the American technology industry’s current struggles with overseas Internet regulators and censors.
- Efforts to enact GRANITE-style shields are now moving entirely under their own power in multiple states and at the federal level, with frequent updates on my blog.
- Federally, the U.S. House of Representatives is reportedly considering a federal GRANITE Act, and Senator Eric Schmitt has vowed to introduce a GRANITE-style shield bill in the U.S. Senate.
I’ve taught cryptocurrency law at Fordham Law School in NYC and Antonin Scalia Law School at GMU in DC, although I’m currently taking a break from teaching to focus on work. Previously, I worked as a securitization lawyer in BigLaw in London, England.
Earlier in my career, I co-founded and was COO and general counsel of early enterprise blockchain startup, Monax Industries. 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 website and blog. I’m a pretty big fan of marmots, too, so don’t be surprised if you see one of those appearing in a blog post from time to time.
For media or professional inquiries, I can be reached via contact form or on LinkedIn.