MWE Crypto and Restructuring Team Authors “The Government’s Role in Crypto Bankruptcies” in the American Bar Association’s First-Issued Crypto Textbook “Banking [on] Blockchain”

McDermott Will & Emery’s Cryptocurrency and Restructuring teams drafted a key section in “Banking [on] Blockchain”, a comprehensive guide to the regulatory and legal frameworks for blockchain, decentralization, and cryptocurrencies published by the American Bar Association. Some of the biggest names in the crypto industry drafted sections of the textbook, including a forward written by Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal.

Joseph B. Evans, Darren Azman, Joseph Aminov, and Grayson Williams wrote about the role of federal and state regulators in crypto bankruptcy cases. Specifically, the article focuses on the out-sized involvement that U.S. government law enforcement and regulatory bodies have played in crypto Chapter 11 cases as compared to non-crypto cases. For this section of the textbook, the McDermott team pulled on its hands on experience in representing Debtors, Unsecured Creditors Committees, litigants, and other parties in every one of the industry’s largest crypto bankruptcy cases, including Cred, Voyager, Prime, Celsius, Blockfi, Prime Trust, FTX, Genesis, and Terraform. The section of the textbook focuses on whether creditors benefit by aggressive regulator involvement in crypto Chapter 11 cases and whether policy-based objections from regulators harm creditor recoveries. Finally, this section of the textbook identifies and analyzes key decisions made in Voyager and other crypto cases in which regulator objections were rejected by bankruptcy judges in favor of value-maximizing returns for crypto creditors.