Pantera Capital’s Emma Rose Bienvenu is helping shape crypto policy

• Emma Rose Bienvenu serves as chief of staff at the crypto hedge fund Pantera Capital.
• A big part of her role includes talking to regulators and lawmakers about the crypto landscape.
• This article is part of Rise of the Crypto Economy, a series exploring how crypto is reshaping and driving innovation in the global economy.

Emma Rose Bienvenu wears many hats at one of the oldest cryptocurrency and blockchain-focused hedge funds in the industry.

As chief of staff at $5 billion Pantera Capital, Bienvenu spends half his time working directly with the firm’s chief investment officer Joey Krug, helping to deploy capital and keep a close eye on the markets. The other half is dedicated to interfacing with regulators and elected officials to help them understand how the cryptocurrency landscape intersects with securities laws.

“It’s very hard to find people who both understand securities law and CFTC stuff and also understand that the technology and a lot of the proposed rules are based on kind of inaccurate assumptions about how the technology works,” Bienvenu told Insider.

Pantera Capital’s funds invest across blockchain companies, venture stocks and directly in digital assets, such as Bitcoin. The firm was founded by Tiger Management alum Dan Morehead in 2003 with just $1 billion in institutional assets.

Bienvenu was a lawyer by profession and worked for several law firms before joining finance. She previously worked for the Canadian pension giant Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, performing due diligence on private investments, and drafting and reviewing agreements and contractual agreements for M&A and synthetic derivatives.

One of Bienvenu’s favorite parts of her current role is helping regulators and politicians shape cryptocurrency policy and regulation.

“It’s a bit of a trope, I think in pop culture, that crypto people are all libertarians who just want the government to go home,” she said. “I don’t think that’s true at all, do you? I think serious people in the ecosystem are desperate for regulatory clarity and sound policy, but obviously concerned with striking a balance between protecting consumers from fraud or abuse. But neither to kill innovation or send talent abroad. It’s the delicate balance and the needle that needs to be threaded.”

Bienvenu works on both sides of the aisle

Typically, staff members of senators and representatives will call Bienvenu to better understand the cryptocurrency ecosystem and how the industry will respond to proposed laws and regulations.

Policymakers look to Bienvenu since she has experience working on a bunch of Pantera’s portfolio projects on legal issues.

“They need to understand the legal structure as we know it — what is the securities law and the CFTC regulation that is relevant to them? Where is the gray area, where is the lack of clarity? And then given that, how can they best position themselves to be compliant, given how we expect things to play out on the regulatory front,” Bienvenu said of her work at Pantera.

On the flip side, this allows Bienvenu to inform regulators and politicians about key issues facing the cryptocurrency industry, whether it’s what’s stopping people from buying certain products or more clarity about the industry’s inner workings.

Bienvenu believes the industry needs better disclosure in certain areas, particularly for centralized lenders. Since the crypto market plunged, crypto lenders and their counterparties have struggled to stay afloat. Celsius and CoinFlex stopped customer withdrawals due to the current market cycle. Celsius eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

She believes that forcing these types of banks to disclose how long it will take customers to get their money back and to implement disclosures that retail investors would actually understand — even if one-sided — would be healthy for the cryptocurrency space.

Bienvenu is also closely watching stablecoin regulation, which is expected to roll out sometime this year, according to CoinDesk. The federal law is expected to “require stablecoin issuers to have proper reserves and disclose their holdings,” the publication noted. Bienvenu is working with the staff of a few senators who are rolling out the rule.

“I think it’s a pretty healthy step to require audits and disclosure of security,” she said.