I’m a partner at Brown Rudnick, where my practice focuses on helping entrepreneurs and their companies tackle complex cross-border legal issues arising from the use of cutting-edge technology. Past and present clients include funds and companies focusing on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency sale and exchange, decentralized network protocol development, social media, gaming, and SaaS.
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 Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where I teach the course “Cryptocurrency Law and Practice.” Previously, I was a securitization and derivatives lawyer with the London offices of Berwin Leighton Paisner (now known as Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner) and Norton Rose Fulbright.
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 permissioned blockchain 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.
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