Lawyering at the Frontier: Lessons from a Crypto GC

In this essay, the author shares lessons from the front lines of a field where the rules are still being written, and what that has taught her about practicing law in frontier technologies—lessons that apply just as much to lawyers in other fields like AI, robotics, and biotech.

When I first entered crypto, it was disorienting. Having spent the first part of my career in the most traditional of legal settings, crypto seemed completely foreign: there were few established frameworks or consistent definitions and no natural regulator in charge. The architecture of blockchain networks was like something from The Matrix, and most products sat somewhere in the gray: was it a security, a commodity, currency, software, all of the above, or something we didn’t yet have a word for?

To survive as a crypto lawyer was to live in that ambiguity: to make judgment calls in the absence of guidance or precedent, to translate between engineers and policymakers, to convince leadership that uncertainty didn’t mean impossibility, and to learn from the many brilliant lawyers and policy pros who were figuring it out together: improvising, debating, and adapting in real time.

I didn’t know it then, and we didn’t always get it right, but we were helping to write the playbook for how to practice law in frontier technologies.

The Translator’s Role

Crypto lawyering forced you to become fluent in new languages: legal, technical, and human.

I still remember one of my first conversations with a regulator. I was trying to explain that a “validator” on a blockchain wasn’t quite an issuer, broker, or exchange, but a new kind of mechanism for coordinating data and value. The blank stares said everything. So I reached for analogies: “Think of a validator as a referee: they don’t control the game, but they enforce its rules.” It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start.

Later, I found myself explaining to engineers what “custody” and “control” meant under securities and money-transmission laws and why, if their code held the power to move assets, regulators might see it differently. That’s when I realized my job wasn’t just interpretation; it was translation: between code and law, product and policy, intention and perception.

That skill, I think, will define every lawyer who works in AI, quantum, robotics, biotech, and other frontier technologies in the decades ahead. You can’t defend or advise on what you don’t understand, and you can’t expect regulators to adapt unless you can speak their language, too.

Principles When the Rules Don’t Exist

The hardest part of crypto wasn’t the complexity; it was the uncertainty. You had to make peace with the idea that there might not be a perfect answer, a clear precedent, or a guaranteed outcome. Some lawyers freeze in that space; crypto lawyers thrive there.

We realized quickly that most laws either didn’t fit or exist for crypto. So we leaned on fundamentals: fairness, transparency, market integrity, stability, accountability. Those principles guided how we advised founders and talked to regulators.

On a personal note, having a background in traditional securities market structure helped me assure policymakers that we understood the purpose of existing guardrails, but that there was a way to design new technology to honor the same principles.

And teaching engineers that “compliance” wasn’t about slowing down but about designing systems that were fair and auditable earned trust internally, too.

That’s the lesson I’d offer to any lawyer working in an emerging field: when the law hasn’t caught up, go back to the underlying principles. What are the existing rules trying to protect in the first place, and how can we achieve those goals with the tools of today?

History as a Guide

Understanding history is one of the most powerful tools a lawyer can wield. When the technology is new, risk-averse regulators instinctively look backward. They search for historical analogies: when was the last time something strange like this appeared, and the world didn’t end? How did our approach to regulating that thing allow it grow responsibly?

That’s why being fluent in history matters. In crypto, the industry grounded its arguments in the story of the open internet, comparing blockchain networks to TCP/IP or HTTP, base-layer protocols that enabled competition precisely because they weren’t overregulated. That analogy helped policymakers see blockchains as infrastructure, even a public good.

The industry also pointed to Section 230 and the fight for net neutrality, which gave early internet companies breathing room to grow before regulation ossified. The parallel argument was simple: let blockchain networks stay open, and layer accountability on top rather than hardcoding it into the base protocol layer.

And studying the evolution of capital markets, from the 1930s securities laws to the creation of Reg NMS, let us position new technologies like blockchain-based markets not as some scary new thing, but simply the next chapter in the modernization of the markets, just like the move away from paper stock certificates 50 years ago.

In other words, innovation doesn’t appear out of nowhere; it builds on history.

Governance as Architecture

One of the most exciting things about crypto was realizing that trust could be designed into the system. You could build fairness into smart contracts that proved execution quality or redistribute profits to prevent unfair advantage, or embed compliance features into tokenized equities, in ways uniquely enabled by this technology.

That idea isn’t unique to crypto anymore. AI developers are doing the same thing with model cards and data-lineage attestations. Biotech firms are doing it with automated traceability and safety triggers. It’s a shift from governance as paperwork to governance as product design, and it’s the future of how lawyers, engineers, and regulators will work together.

Learning From Missteps and Eyes on the Prize

Of course, we didn’t always get it right. Early on, we overestimated how quickly policymakers could adapt, and underestimated how words like “decentralized,” “permissionless,” “trustless,” or “unhosted wallets” would land. Figuring out how to balance privacy rights with legitimate concerns about illicit finance remains a challenge. And we gave airtime to people who didn’t deserve it, and a lifetime of work and credibility went up in smoke overnight—taking years to recover. 

Those moments taught me that credibility is everything, but also not to get disillusioned. Many of us left stable, respectable careers in the law to join something new and uncertain. Some of us, like me, believed that the riskier path was to be left behind as this new technology took hold, and it wasn’t always easy to stay the course. But bad actors, blowups, bear cycles, and lawfare forced us to remember why we joined the industry in the first place: because of the technology’s potential to change the world. Maintaining that belief in the face of setbacks—learning, adapting, and rebuilding—is what every lawyer in frontier fields will have to master.

Coalitions and Common Ground

One of crypto’s greatest lessons has been that progress never comes from one company, or even one sector. It comes from coalition-building. The most meaningful advances didn’t come from court decisions or enforcement actions; they came from industry groups, open-source collaborations, and policy dialogues where lawyers, engineers, and regulators actually talked to each other.

In AI, in data, in any frontier field, those coalitions will be just as vital. Having a set of unified principles within your industry is key: values you refuse to compromise on. Finding common ground with other industries is also helpful. I used to spend evenings scanning through comment letters on crypto rulemakings—my idea of a nerdy treasure hunt for unexpected allies in unlikely places.

The future belongs to lawyers who can convene, not just advise. Who see themselves not just as corporate defenders, but as bridge-builders in an ecosystem that’s writing its own governance in real time.

Geopolitical Navigators

Crypto also changed how I thought about global lawyering. A single product might be coded in the U.S., deployed in Singapore, governed by a DAO in Switzerland, with a token issued in the British Virgin Islands, each with different legal implications. Forum-shopping often gets a bad rap, but with emerging technologies, it’s often the only chance innovation has to gain oxygen. In the 21st century, lawyers must be geopolitical navigators.

From Advisor to Design Partner

What I love most about frontier work is how it collapses the boundaries. You’re not just a lawyer; you’re part strategist, part policy architect, part systems designer. Your conversations aren’t only about contracts or compliance; they’re about incentive design and governance models.

In crypto, legal risk touches almost everything. That makes the lawyer the connective tissue of the organization: the person who has to weigh risk against market reality while protecting space for builders to build.

That’s the job now: not just to keep the company out of legal trouble, but to help build the future responsibly, and honestly? That’s what makes it so fulfilling. Working in a space this new means your legal advice doesn’t just shape one company’s outcome, but can potentially influence how society governs an entirely new domain of technology.

The First Mover Advantage

The most unexpected lesson I learned from crypto was that, when it comes to new technology, the first mover advantage doesn’t just belong to the tech startup—it belongs to the regulator that is open to innovation, and on a global scale—the country that does the same. Regulators that don’t take an effective or constructive approach to regulating an industry risk losing their authority and credibility. The same goes for countries, as talent and investment moves offshore. My hope is that crypto’s experience over the last few years offers valuable lessons not just for lawyers working in other emerging tech fields, but also for governments grappling with how to regulate a new technology.

The Frontier Mindset

Looking back, crypto started as money, but that’s never really what it was about. It was about governance: about what happens when code begins to act like law. It forced lawyers in its fold to stretch every skill we had: interpretation, translation, diplomacy, design.

Those same muscles will define the next decade for tech lawyers across every field. Whether it’s AI, quantum computing, robotics, or biotech, they’ll all face the same tests we did: fragmented oversight, unclear definitions, competing jurisdictions, and the need to balance innovation with trust.

The good news is, we’ve done this before. We know how to operate in the gray, how to design fairness into systems, how to speak across disciplines, how to draw on history, and how to build coalitions when the full picture hasn’t emerged. That’s what it means to be a lawyer at the frontier. Not to wait for clarity, but to help create it together.

The author is General Counsel of Veda Tech Labs, a crypto company building infrastructure for decentralized finance. She has served in senior legal and policy roles across the crypto industry and prior to that, was Chief Counsel of the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs and Senior Counsel in the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. She began her career practicing securities law at WilmerHale and clerked on the federal district court in Manhattan. She is a graduate of Yale Law School.