Coinbase Hires SEC Counsel in Regulatory Role

Thaya Knight joins crypto exchange after working for Commissioner Elad Roisman

article-image

Blockworks exclusive art by axel rangel

share

key takeaways

  • Roisman announced last month he intended to resign from the SEC
  • Knight also spent two years as counsel for SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has advocated for a crypto regulatory framework

The former counsel for Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Elad Roisman has left the agency to join Coinbase.

Thaya Knight’s last day at the SEC was Friday, she wrote on LinkedIn. Her role at Coinbase as a senior public policy manager entails watching the regulatory landscape, which companies expect to evolve in 2022.

“What we want to do as Coinbase is make sure that we’re raising our hand when we feel the rules of the road are not clear,” Coinbase President Emilie Choi said at the Bloomberg Financial Innovation Summit last month.

Knight worked for about a year as the counsel for Roisman, who was appointed to the SEC by then-President Donald Trump in 2018. Roisman said in a statement last month that he intended to resign by the end of January.  

Before working for Roisman, Knight spent about a year as senior counsel for policy and regulation for the Federal Housing Finance Agency. 

She was also previously counsel to SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has been critical of the agency’s failure to approve a spot bitcoin ETF.   

Knight declined to comment on her move. A spokesperson for Coinbase did not immediately return a request for comment.


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template.png

Research

RTK networks are critical to enabling a world of ubiquitous autonomous drones, vehicles, and industrial robots. We believe the GEOD token enables both a cost and product advantage for the GEODNET RTK network, which will allow it to out-compete multi-billion dollar incumbents Trimble and Hexagon.

article-image

Revenue estimates for the third quarter come in at $33 billion, which would be an 83% increase from the prior year

article-image

Senator Cynthia Lummis hopes a US strategic bitcoin reserve can be teed up for “adoption in 2025”

article-image

As EIP-4844 “blobs” transform the economics of Ethereum layer-2s, a growing debate pits long-term scalability against immediate ETH value

article-image

Prosecutors argued that FTX co-founder Gary Wang cooperated in their case against former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried

article-image

The two largest crypto exchanges respectively run the second- and sixth-largest Solana validators

article-image

MicroStrategy’s bitcoin buying has exploded — it now holds 1.7% of the asset’s circulating supply