Verified excerpt published on July 25, 2025
Crypto Meets Wall Street—But Are the Lawyers Ready?
Few questions nagging me about treasury management companies:
(1) How do you comply with ongoing PubCo disclosure obligations? If you disclose ongoing efforts of the digital asset issuer, you're increasing securities laws risk for the digital asset. If you don't, you may be committing fraud.
(2) How do you reconcile a commitment to digital asset holders to support the price of the asset with equity capital raises of the PubCo with the Gary Plastic case?
(3) What do you do when the shares eventually trade below NAV?
These problems are manageable for treasury management companies being set up by third parties for very mature projects like BTC, ETH, and SOL. I'm not sure these problems are solvable where management teams of less mature projects are spinning up and controlling these public vehicles themselves.
Crypto lawyers should be doing a better job here.
Miles Jennings
Head of Policy & General Counsel
Miles Jennings is the Head of Policy & General Counsel at a16z crypto, the cryptocurrency-focused division of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In this role, he advises the firm and its portfolio companies on matters related to decentralization, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), governance, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and compliance with state and federal securities laws. Prior to joining a16z, he was a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins, where he co-chaired the global blockchain and cryptocurrency task force. In that capacity, he served as lead counsel for numerous startups and investors in the crypto space, including prominent firms such as Aave, Bitwise, Avalanche, Element, Idle, Connext, 3Box, and Aztec.