Angela Walch

Biography

Angela Walch is a Professor of Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London.

Her research focuses on money and the law, cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies, and financial stability. Walch’s work on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies is internationally recognized and widely cited across multiple disciplines (including law, economics, finance, computer science, governance, archival science, and others).

Walch taught one of the first law school classes in the world on cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies, and the law, and began covering Bitcoin in her Law of Money seminar in the spring of 2013. Her writings are used in classes at top universities internationally, and she speaks at events around the world.

Walch has presented her research at Harvard Law School, Stanford University, the Federal Reserve, and the London School of Economics, among others. Her work has appeared the NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, the Review of Banking & Financial Law, and American Banker, and has been cited in reports by the Financial Stability Board, the OECD, and the European Commission. Walch has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, TIME Magazine, Wired, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, along with other media outlets.

Before entering academia, Walch practiced transactional law at the firm of Ropes & Gray in Boston and in the Office of the General Counsel at Harvard University. She also practiced in London, where she worked in-house for Sainsbury’s and served as general counsel for Brand Events.

Publications

Publications

Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems, in Crypto Assets: Legal and Monetary Perspectives (ed. Chris Brummer), Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019.

In Code(rs) We Trust: Software Developers as Fiduciaries in Public Blockchains in Regulating Blockchain. Techno-Social and Legal Challenges, (eds Philipp Hacker, Ioannis Lianos, Georgios Dimitropoulos & Stefan Eich), Oxford University Press, 2019.

区块链的诡异词汇：监管者面临的另一个挑战   [美]安吉拉•瓦尔奇王淑芳译许多奇校 (Chinese translation of Blockchain’s Treacherous Vocabulary: One More Challenge for Regulators), 互联网金融法律评论（第十辑）[Internet Finance Law Review, Volume X], 2018.

Blockchain’s Treacherous Vocabulary: One More Challenge for Regulators, 21 No. 2 Journal of Internet Law 1 (2017). 

The Path of the Blockchain Lexicon (and the Law), 36 Rev. Banking & Fin. L. 713 (2017).

Open Source Operational Risk: Should Public Blockchains Serve as Financial Market Infrastructures? in Handbook of Blockchain, Digital Finance, and Inclusion, Vol. 2 (Elsevier, David Lee Kuo Chuen and Robert Deng, eds., 2017).

The Bitcoin Blockchain as Financial Market Infrastructure: A Consideration of Operational Risk, 18 New York University Journal of Legislation & Public Policy 837 (2015).

Other Scholarly Projects

Blockchain Applications to International Affairs: Reasons for Skepticism, 19 Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 27 (2018) (transcribed interview).

Michel Rauchs et. al, Distributed Ledger Technology Systems: A Conceptual Framework, Report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, August 2018 (contributor).

Op-eds

We Haven’t Learned From the Financial Crisis–Just Look at Crypto, Breaker Magazine, September 19, 2018.

Islands No More: Crypto Hedge Funds Bring Cryptocurrency Risk Into Mainstream Financial System, Forbes.com, October 11, 2017.

Blockchain’s Stumbles Take the Romance out of Decentralization, op-ed in Payments Source, August 24, 2016.

Call Blockchain Developers What They Are: Fiduciaries, op-ed in American Banker, August 9, 2016.