Form & Structure

Greg Xethalis, General Counsel at Multicoin Capital, and Karen Ubell, Partner and Co-Chair of the Digital Currency & Blockchain practice at Goodwin, join Patrick Murck for the Policy & Regulatory Roundtable. Recorded August 26, the conversation covers the SEC's proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, where the CLARITY Act sits ahead of its September 15 cloture vote, and why the fight holding it up has almost nothing to do with securities law.

Here is a link to the SAFT whitepaper: https://www.cooley.com/-/media/cooley/pdf/reprints/saft-project-whitepaper.pdf

On May 14th, the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee — but a markup isn't a law, and passage isn't the finish line. Sheila Warren (Former CEO, Crypto Council for Innovation) and Greg Xethalis (General Counsel, Multicoin Capital) join Patrick Murck for Form & Structure's monthly policy roundtable to break down the main pillars of the CLARITY Act, why GENIUS may have been the bill that mattered, and the regulatory work ahead. As Greg puts it: "We've probably got five years of rulemakings ahead of us if clarity passes. If clarity doesn't pass, there's still two to three years of important rulemaking." A candid conversation on developer protections, the calendar risk facing the bill, and whether crypto's policy class is about to lose its main-character status.

In another episode of our recurring Policy & Regulatory Roundtable, Karen Ubell, Partner at Goodwin, joins Patrick Murck to discuss the SEC and CFTC's joint guidance on crypto assets and break down the framework. Karen warns its 'express promises' approach 'encourages no disclosures,' an unusual position for an agency 'founded on the basis of full and fair disclosure.' They also cover how the framework cites the 2017 SAFT (which she and Patrick both contributed to) as a valid mechanism a decade after the SEC was rumored to hate it, whether CLARITY actually crosses the finish line. Note: This episode was recorded before the Senate Banking voted to advance the CLARITY Act.

Peter Glyman (Coinbax) joins Patrick Murck to break down the compliance layer missing from enterprise stablecoin payments...and why community banks are running out of time.

Greg Xethalis, Karen Ubell, and Sheila Warren join Patrick Murck to debate the Clarity Act blowup, crypto market structure legislation strategy, and whether there's still a window to pass comprehensive crypto legislation this year or if the industry needs to modularize and pass what it can.

Financial regulation is failing to keep pace with innovation and the results are catastrophic. The UN estimates that less than 1% of financial crime gets caught globally, despite banks spending tens of billions annually on AML compliance. In this episode, Surus CEO Patrick Murck sits down with Jo Ann Barefoot, former Deputy Comptroller of the Currency and CEO of the Alliance for Innovative Regulation, to explore why outdated regulatory technology is the bottleneck preventing both effective crime detection and financial innovation.

Featuring Jo Ann Barefoot's decades of experience helping regulators adapt to technological change, from FinTech waves to crypto to AI transformation.

Relevant for: Crypto builders, DeFi teams, compliance professionals, RegTech innovators, stablecoin issuers, tokenized asset platforms, financial services leaders, policy experts.

U.S. policymakers continue to wrestle with how to regulate decentralized finance, stablecoins, and the broader crypto ecosystem. But as our guests Rebecca Rettig and Mike Mosier argue, the central challenge has never been "decentralization." Instead, the real regulatory question is who has independent control over other people's value.

In this monthly policy roundtable, Patrick Murck is joined by Greg Xethalis (General Counsel, Multicoin Capital) and Karen Ubell (Partner, Goodwin) to break down the urgent push for crypto market structure legislation before midterms. They discuss Mike Selig's nomination to chair the CFTC and what his crypto expertise means for the agency's expansion into spot markets. They examine whether Congress should rush legislation or take time to get it right, what the Binance listing terms leak reveals about US regulatory arbitrage, and why moving from 54 state licenses to federal oversight matters for competitiveness.

Protocol Labs' Juan Benet (Founder & CEO) and Diana Stern (Deputy General Counsel) join Patrick Murck on this week's episode. They discuss launching the PL 'alignment asset' token as a novel way to share incentives across Protocol Labs' network of over 700 companies.

Patrick Murck hosts David Tse (Co-Founder of Babylon Labs co-founder and Stanford professor) dive into how Babylon attracted nearly $7 billion in Bitcoin staking and explore their new trustless Bitcoin vaults that activate dormant Bitcoin assets for productive use in DeFi.