Dan Kahan

i posted on linkedin earlier this week that @kslaw is opening an office in miami. the post has generated more impressions and inbound messages than anything i've ever posted, anywhere. @rabois and @FrancisSuarez may be onto something.

@alexrkonrad now go find the user who bet on "synergy" in the speech prediction markets and give that person . . . a VC internship

Fernando Mendoza is the first accepted VC intern to win the Heisman and talk about “synergy” in his post-championship on-field interview

Miamiposting might be a phenomenon whose time has passed, but having just spent a few days visiting, it really does feel like a boomtown in a way that no other American city that I've spent time in over the past few years does. In some ways, it reminds me of Chinese cities.

@lex_node real securities lawyers who advise crypto projects have no reason to be offended by this. this should only really offended those LARPing.

okay so here is my somewhat toxic legal take that I think can manage to piss off pretty much everyone and every type of person in crypto simultaneously: *right now there are numerous launchpad projects that pitch themselves along the lines of 'make tokens work like equity but without securities regs' (some go even farther like 'tokenize equity without it being a security' (= 🚓🚨🚔)); some of these are getting quite a bit of traction *most of these are quite clearly illegal, I have a lawyer chat where in recent weeks a solid chunk of the conversation has been lawyers just acting perplexed about the trend and making fun of these *a small few have better legal arguments, usually because of more participatory governance features, and/or more smart contract mitigations, and/or more careful legal structuring and/or conservative marketing *if you think this is somehow legal or sustainable, I'd like to invite you to run a reductio ad absurdum on it...either the world cares about securities laws or it does not...if it cares about them the world cannot allow a massive open loophole/arb against the securities laws to gain scale, as if securities laws are 'opt-out' then since securities laws always raise compliance costs and at least in early stage increase cost of capital (less liquidity), everyone will opt out of the securities laws en masse and they will cease to exist as a practical matter (or only maybe exist for bluechips like Apple). . .so you can ask yourself which you think is more realistic, that society is effectively repealing all securities laws in this indirect way through sustained non-enforcement against this 'arb', or that this arb is short-lived and will eventually be shut down to disastrous effect *regardless of how your exercise comes out (I think multiple outcomes of the thought experiment are actually plausible), since what's happening is currently illegal at least "on paper," why not just go all the way and tokenize equity and do the illegal shit with that? it would be -->way lower cost (you don't have to pay all these projects and their lawyers for elaborate complicated structuring because normal equity securities (stock) have easy default options and corporations are already the best social and capital markets scaling tech ever invented) -->from an investor POV, more clearly and certainly deliver the benefits of equity, which is the entire point of what these projects are trying to make tokens do in more roundabout and doubtful ways -->from an investor POV, not only do they *not* have regulatory risk, they actually get a free put right against the founders if indeed the way this is done is illegal, so if indeed it is illegal, investor financial risk is somewhat reduced at least, and certainly not increased -->designed to dovetail with Atkins' recent statement that he will make IPOs much more attractive, meaning more companies could go public with their equity securities earlier/cheaper, tokenize the equity and then close the token/equity arb 'the legal way' -->less value goes to too-clever-by-half lawyers who are just max-extracting from all this while telling appealing lies that somehow this could possibly be compliant (it can't, the securities laws have broad anti-evasion rules and in the U.S. are basically the most loophole-free laws ever created) as the old-timers from Boardwalk Empire said, "you can't be half a gangsta" so if you're doing illegal shit, why kid yourself--why not just go all the way and just start making your equity directly tokenized and liquid? like I said, this is ragebait, but it's honest ragebait, and I think these questions are very worth asking before a bunch of projects (esp. legit AI/robotics ones from outside crypto) get suckered into "tokenize your equity without it being a security" and jeopardize their entire business with these complicated structures, only to have them crashing down in ways much harder to unwind than if they just got a bit more creative/aggressive with normal equity liquidity or whatever I am not saying to break the law...I'm saying you're already breaking the law and if I was already breaking the law, I'd try to pay lawyers & other weird 'structuring' predators less in the process while positioning myself for a wider equity freedom future at the very least, one could say of such experiments that they would at least be helping to build the infra and social practices around the equity tokenization wave that everyone knows is coming....I cannot say that of these ridiculous legal structuring securities law loophole launchpads, which are neither economically nor legally nor commercially efficient and will not last food for thought? 🖖😎

congratulations to the @Ripple and @palisadeinc teams on this important acquisition!

great work here by @DerekColla, @RSSH273, and the @doublezero team on this. we’ve come a long way from the tokenjet days!

“typewriters will hurt our bottom line” “word processors will hurt our bottom line” “internet research tools will hurt our bottom line” anything can hurt your bottom line if you don’t figure out ways to leverage your time better to deliver more and better service to clients.

@federalreserve @FDICgov @USOCC issue joint statement on risk-management considerations for crypto-asset safekeeping: federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…

@regulatorynerd Woah woah woah, you skipped right over replacing branches with the metaverse

Stablecoins and LLMs are exciting, but I remain convinced that there are still material value creation opportunities in financial services by shifting legacy products into containers and cloud.

We're hiring a US-based senior relationship manager at @StarkWareLtd - please DM me if interested! starkware.co/careers/career…

there are a few things going on with stablecoins and market structure legislation these days, so i'm excited that @kslaw and @ElecTranAssoc are hosting @RepFrenchHill in our office today for our 2025 Fintech Summit! kslaw.com/news-and-insig…

@Drew_Morris meanwhile, the other side’s counsel recognizing your generational legal talent

Lawyers after successfully redlining the term of an NDA from 3 years down to 1

We're not saying your crypto assets are securities, but if they are (and we're working on clarifying that) or your company is involved in the crypto industry, here's some disclosure guidance: sec.gov/newsroom/speec…

now we have some potential creative solutions offered up by the SEC Staff on how to solve these these square-peg-round-hole issues.

here's the background: some tokens are securities. a lot of the current securities law disclosure requirements (in Regulation S-K) don't make sense for tokens, at least not as written. some of us have been wrestling with these issues for a decade.

@kkirkbos if you're going to report my messages as spam, i guess it's at least nice you think they're creative.

The spam texts are getting exceptionally creative.

@lex_node not to mention solutions in this market include many recyclable open source legal contributions made by you and others.

@lex_node totally agree. but there's a big world between ctrl-h and "let type out my own legal structure for having rights vest over time." way too many people doing the latter, without understanding that a lot of these issues have already been solved, in this market or adjacent ones.

agree, and this problem extends beyond just transfer restrictions. in a space where technical composability is ubiquitous, the amount of legal wheel-reinventing is as dangerous as it is dumb. e.g., why does everyone write their own vesting/lockup provisions from scratch?

@lex_node this is another thing that was solved decades ago in traditional markets (with the drafting improved over time) but plagues these new markets, in part, because of a lack of awareness of history and a collective insistence on learning all the hard lessons all over again.

If you have good lawyers they should be drafting the transfer restrictions broadly enough to prohibit this.

Join us for the Corporate Venture Panel.⁠ 💼⁠ Register Now for #FVCC25MIAMI: bit.ly/FVCC25MIAMIReg…⁠ ⁠ Featuring Panelists:⁠ Michael Hauser, SAIC Ventures⁠ Stephanie Cherrin, @jpmorgan⁠ Craig Lange, @Caterpillar⁠Inc Daniel Kahan, @kslaw