Events
Angela Walch
Professor of Law
Contact Information
Education
- J.D., Harvard Law School, 2002
- B.A., with honors, Harvard College, 1998
License to Practice
- Texas
- Massachusetts
Specialties and Courses
- Cryptocurrencies & Blockchain Technologies
- Contracts
- Contract drafting
- Jurisprudence / Philosophy of Law
- Law & Technology
- Financial Regulation
Biography
Angela Walch is a Professor of Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London.
Her research focuses on money and the law, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technologies. Walch’s work is internationally recognized and cited, and she speaks at events around the world. She is known for her work on the governance of cryptocurrencies and her theory that software developers function as fiduciaries in cryptoeconomic systems. Walch also taught one of the first law school classes in the world on Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
Walch has presented her research at Stanford University, MIT Media Lab, the Federal Reserve, Harvard Law School, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, 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 BIS, the Financial Stability Board, and the OECD. Walch has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, WIRED, and The Washington Post, 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
- Blockchain Governance: De Facto (x) or Designed? (with Darra Hofman, Quinn DuPont, & Ivan Beschastnikh), in Building Decentralized Trust: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Design of Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers (eds Victoria Lemieux & Chen Feng), Springer, 2021.
- Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems, in Crypto Assets: Legal and Monetary Perspectives (ed. Chris Brummer), Oxford University Press, 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.
- Blockchain’s Treacherous Vocabulary: One More Challenge for Regulators, [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).
Citations
- Work cited in the Treasury Department Report on Section 5 of Executive Order 14067 on Digital Assets, September 2022.
Op-eds
- Congress, Don’t Rush Regulating Crypto, CoinDesk (Op-Ed) (August 2, 2021).
- 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.
Podcasts
- Angela Walch: A Realist’s View of the Infrastructure Bill, CoinDesk’s Opinionated Podcast with Ben Schiller (Aug. 27, 2021)
- Angela Walch, Cryptocurrency: Who’s in Charge?, New Money Review Podcast (Nov. 4, 2021)
Legislative Testimony
- Angela Walch, Testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Hearing on Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?, July 27, 2021 Questions for the Record