US blockchain platform Algorand Foundation’s chief legal and operating officer Jennie Levin is a former US federal prosecutor who is now helping Algorand navigate fast-changing global crypto regulation. Global Legal Post spoke with Jennie about her dual role, the evolving regulatory environment and the skills she learned during her time as an assistant US attorney.
What are your responsibilities as chief legal and operating officer at the Algorand Foundation?
They’re expansive. I think of it as wearing two hats with one mandate: protect Algorand legally while keeping the business moving. On the legal side, I cover everything from marketing review, regulatory strategy across all of our jurisdictions, corporate governance for all of our entities, contracts, employment law and ecosystem programme structuring. On the operating side, I cover cross-functional execution, vendor and service provider oversight, and making sure the business teams are working together and can actually ship their products without hitting an avoidable legal wall.
How much synergy is there between those two roles – is this something you think may become more common as CLO remits expand?
A tremendous amount. The standard critique of legal is that it’s always the long pole, the department that slows everything down. But that dynamic simply doesn’t work in the crypto and blockchain world, where the regulatory environment shifts too fast, and commercial opportunities are too jurisdiction-specific for legal to function as a gatekeeper. If you’re siloed on the legal side without real visibility into what other teams are building, including engineering, business development and product, you end up saying no to everything, either because you don’t understand what’s being proposed or because by the time you’ve caught up, the window has already closed.
For me, combining these roles is what makes it possible to actually do the job. It means rolling up my sleeves and getting into the trenches with the business, understanding what they want to build, their timeline, and then working out how to adjust a product offering to reduce regulatory risk while still delivering something that works for users. Legal in isolation doesn’t produce good outcomes, and it doesn’t make you the kind of CLO a business wants. Too many CLOs operate in black and white, with no risk spectrum, no revenue lens. That’s not supporting the business, and it’s not how you generate meaningful growth.
How is your legal department structured?
We operate pretty thinly at Algorand. I have one lawyer and a paralegal. I oversee HR as well. I don’t have a separate operations team, so that function sits with me. In an ideal world, I would have additional staff to utilise across legal and operations. When I bring on a lawyer, I am not looking for someone who can review contracts in a silo. I need someone who can build real relationships with engineers and business teams, someone who gets looped in early rather than called in at the end to say yes or no. That is the only way a small legal function actually works.
What are your legal team’s main priorities over the coming year?
Our main focus lately has been US regulatory clarity, particularly the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) joint approach to digital commodities and the pending market structure legislation, which is being marked up as we speak. Also, global regulatory monitoring, including MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) implementation in the EU, as well as APAC market access and supporting our product team on new opportunities in a way that minimises regulatory exposure. Corporate governance is also a significant focus. We recently relocated to the US, so there is a lot of corporate governance work that comes with that.
And compliance is something we’re always paying attention to, especially as we move deeper into global financial enablement. We want to make sure that builders on our blockchain have the tools they need to meet their own compliance obligations, while we protect user privacy at the same time.
We can’t control when we’re going to get clarity in the US, so it’s about staying nimble and keeping abreast of everything that is happening, while also not being too in the weeds that we are stagnant and can’t do our job. We try to consistently operate from a perspective of what we want to build, how we can help the business build it and what’s the best way we can lower our risk.
How challenging is it to navigate the current US crypto regulatory environment and how are you managing this?
As carefully as possible. The US environment is actually the most workable that it’s been in years, but it’s not stable. There’s been a ton of progress in terms of congressional action and rulemaking, but the challenge is how to build within a framework that is still being drafted, and how to operate under the interim guidance. What we try to do at Algorand is build with flexibility, so that as the rules crystallise, we can adapt without having to start over. Sometimes you have to make a game-time decision, but a lot of the time, if you sit down and map it out, you can anticipate what is coming and get ahead of it.
We also document everything from a regulatory perspective and bring in outside counsel when the stakes warrant it. The key mindset is this: as long as you have a good faith basis for your decisions and you have genuinely thought them through, you cannot be paralysed by uncertainty. If you wait for perfect clarity, you will never move.
In what ways has your former role as a federal prosecutor equipped you for your in-house career?
Two things really. The first is communication. As a federal prosecutor, I was constantly switching between audiences. I had to explain complex legal concepts to a jury. I had to work with co-operators, people who came from every imaginable background, gang members, drug dealers, sex traffickers, white-collar criminals, each with their own perspective and their own way of seeing the world. You learn very quickly that how you communicate matters as much as what you are communicating. You have to know your audience and adapt on the fly.
That skill is just as essential in crypto. You are not just talking to lawyers. You are talking to engineers, to hardcore DeFi believers who want zero government involvement, and to regulators or policymakers who are deeply sceptical of the whole industry. The ability to meet each of those people where they are, and actually be heard, is something I use every single day.
The second is how to investigate and dig. As a prosecutor, I had to learn how to ask the right questions, and more importantly, how to keep asking when I was not getting the answers I needed. Blockchain is complicated. Crypto is complicated. You cannot skim the surface and expect to do this job well. You have to take the time to understand the nuances, and my time as a prosecutor trained me to do exactly that.
What do you like to do outside work to relax?
Currently nothing, because I have two-year-old twins, so I’m taking care of them. But when I’m not taking care of my kids, I like to work out. I also just learned how to play Mahjong and I love doing jigsaw puzzles, and playing tennis. But my family is my everything, they’re the most important people in the world to me, so spending time with them is just the best.
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