Twitter and 100-year-old cases are a crypto lawyer’s best friends

LAW school would hardly be sufficient to train a lawyer for the novelties of today’s crypto cases – whether they involve fraud, financial crime or insolvency. The Business Times asked several lawyers how they prepared themselves to tackle this unique intersection of law and technology. 

Blast from the past

Dealing with the novelties of crypto law is “almost like going back to the late 1800s or early 1900s”, said Danny Ong, the managing director of Setia Law. When he represented B2C2 in Singapore’s first Bitcoin case in 2019, he even read up on cases “involving the barter of horses for wheat”, to understand how certain fundamental legal principles evolved over the centuries.

While crypto cases present newfangled challenges, lawyers ultimately go back to the basics – developing arguments on first principles, and offering the courts a novel solution. “You’ve got to be creative and think outside the box,” he said.