He Went to Prison for Crypto Crime. Now He’s an Advocate for Compliance.

livemint.com:

As crypto entrepreneurs such as FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried and former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky face criminal allegations of misconduct and possibly prison time, one of the Justice Department’s earliest collars has a message for today’s players: Get compliant. Charlie Shrem was an early apostle of cryptocurrency, earning millions of dollars trading bitcoin and treated like a rock star worldwide, with fans at conferences snapping photos of him and pushing business cards at him.

But the one-time chief executive and compliance officer of BitInstant went to prison in 2015 for a drug scheme involving the bitcoin exchange he co-founded and an online black market, making Shrem one of the first in the U.S. to get jail time for crimes connected to crypto.

Today, the 33-year-old says he is mining his experience and urging the latest generation of crypto companies to erect guardrails against corporate misconduct. “There’s a whole bunch of people out there wrestling with the crypto compliance beast, trying to figure it all out with their lawyers," said Shrem, who is now a general partner at venture-capital firm Druid Ventures, advising crypto startups and projects on strategy and growth.

“That’s where I come in, helping them get their ducks in a row." And a chastened crypto-advocate is precisely what the Justice Department wanted, according to Alexander J. Wilson, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who oversaw Shrem’s sentencing in 2014 and now a partner at law firm Jones Day.