Crypto Legal Developments for Private Equity and Commercial Finance Practitioners — Fall 2026
American Bar Association, Business Law Section — Financial Services Technology Joint Subcommittee, Fall 2026 Meeting
Hosted by Financial Services Technology Joint Subcommittee (Commercial Finance Committee and Private Equity & Venture Capital Committee)
Chanté Eliaszadeh — Panelist
Discussion
At the Fall 2026 meeting of the ABA Business Law Section's Financial Services Technology Joint Subcommittee — chaired by David M. Adlerstein of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — I led two segments of a panel surveying the year's crypto legal developments for private equity and commercial finance practitioners, against the backdrop of the March 17, 2026 joint SEC-CFTC Interpretation and the SEC's proposed Regulation Crypto Assets (comments close October 20, 2026).
My first lead examined the sector's institutionalization alongside what is actually happening in DeFi — a tale of two cities in which the private-rails thesis and the public-rails outcome diverged, read through bank deposit-token deployments on public chains, a decomposition of DeFi's headline TVL figures, and the enforcement counterweights that remain. My second lead covered custody and vaults: the four documents that decide every custody failure before it happens — the terms of use that fix title versus bailment (the Celsius lesson), the undiligenced sub-custody chain, withdrawal-policy governance, and the control agreement the lender assumed the custodian would sign — together with what Article 8 opt-ins versus Article 12 control mean for secured lenders, and how to read the SEC's recent custody signals, including Commissioner Peirce's vault statement, at their actual precedential weight.
Across the other segments, I addressed how the Division of Enforcement will read a Rule 400 Form TR certification, and the gap the proposal's blue-sky preemption leaves for state conduct licensing — where California's DFAL licensure trigger, live since July 1, 2026, means an issuer can be Reg-CA-compliant in fifty states and still unlicensed to face a single California resident.
Panel Roster
- Moderator
- David M. Adlerstein — Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
- Panelists
- Olta Andoni — Bellementis PLLC (SEC rules proposal and crypto-AI segments)
- Jonathan Schmalfeld — The Digital Chamber (Director of Policy — legislative and stablecoin segments)
- David Brill — Wall Street Blockchain Alliance (Chair, Crypto Assets Working Group — deal-market and incidents segments)
Topics Covered
- Regulation Crypto Assets
- SEC-CFTC joint interpretation
- Token taxonomy
- Digital asset custody
- Crypto vaults
- Article 8 and Article 12 (UCC)
- California DFAL
- DeFi institutionalization
- Stablecoins
- Digital asset market structure
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