DAVID LOPEZ-KURTZ
Partner and Chief AI & Technology Innovation Officer

David Lopez-Kurtz advises companies, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators at the forefront of digital assets, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence, helping them transform innovative concepts into successful ventures while addressing the legal considerations that accompany new business models and disruptive technologies.

David counsels clients at the intersection of technology, corporate strategy, and regulatory compliance, guiding technology companies from initial formation and structuring through financing, launch, expansion, and exit strategies. He works with crypto, blockchain, and digital asset companies on project development, token and digital asset offerings, securities law compliance, financing strategies, and the creation of customized compliance programs. Understanding that many companies in this space operate amid shifting regulatory expectations, David develops practical solutions that enable clients to pursue opportunities while managing risk. He also provides ongoing compliance support, including fractional chief compliance officer services, delivering experienced oversight tailored to companies’ needs.

David guides clients through token launches and exchange listings. He advises on token generation events and airdrop structuring, negotiates market-making arrangements, and handles listing agreements with major centralized exchanges, coordinating the legal, regulatory, and commercial workstreams a launch requires across multiple jurisdictions and counterparties at once.

David’s AI guidance is founded in his practical, working experience. As the firm’s Chief AI & Technology Innovation Officer, he builds and evaluates software directly, designing agentic harnesses, tool-use and orchestration layers, retrieval pipelines, model evaluations, and guardrails, while serving as co-chair of the firm’s AI committee, which leads AI governance and ethics considerations while the law races to keep pace with technology. He counsels developers and companies building AI into their products on rights in training data and model outputs, on control and liability as agents take actions on a user’s behalf, and on the regulatory exposure that follows from architectural choices.

Beyond his emerging technology practice, David also maintains a broad corporate and securities practice representing public and private companies, startups, and investors. He advises clients on business formation, fundraising, mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, securities offerings, and disclosure matters. His experience includes alternative securities offerings, such as Regulation A+, Regulation D/Rule 506(c), Regulation S, and equity crowdfunding offerings, as well as securities compliance and remediation strategies.

David is pursuing an LLM in Taxation at New York University School of Law, deepening his understanding of how tax shapes transactional and architectural structure and decision-making, including entity selection and choice of jurisdiction. He builds that analysis into his work, facilitating interdisciplinary counseling and a holistic view of the economic realities and challenges of businesses in a global economy.

David is recognized for his thought leadership in areas where technology and law continue to evolve. He publishes and speaks regularly on developments involving cryptocurrency, blockchain, Web3, the metaverse, and AI, and his practical counsel helps clients anticipate regulatory developments in areas where established legal frameworks are still taking shape.

Clients value David’s combination of legal knowledge, business perspective, and entrepreneurial mindset. His experience advising innovative companies, along with his unconventional background, including working as a chef and commercial fisherman in Alaska, gives him an appreciation for the challenges entrepreneurs face when building and scaling new ventures. A former practitioner at Dinsmore & Shohl and founder of a blockchain-focused legal services venture, David brings a practical, solutions-oriented approach to helping clients pursue their goals while addressing complex legal issues.

In addition to his legal practice, David serves as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where he has taught courses on emerging technologies and corporate law. An experienced educator, he readily distills complex legal concepts into clear, actionable guidance for his clients and students.

Representative Matters:

• Represented a blockchain foundation in negotiating and executing market-making and listing agreements with major centralized exchanges, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Bithumb, in advance of a global token launch. Ran parallel negotiations across multiple exchange counterparties, each with its own contractual and compliance framework, coordinated with Swiss counsel on cross-border issues spanning Singapore, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Hong Kong, and delivered execution readiness across all counterparties under a compressed pre-launch timeline.
• Served as lead outside counsel to a publicly traded tokenized-securities platform on the structuring and launch of the first gold-backed yield-bearing security token issued in the United States. Structured concurrent Regulation D and Regulation S offerings, and conducted the Investment Company Act “40% test” to avoid inadvertent investment-company status, and advised on a related $40.25 million confidentially marketed public offering, with the token offering uncapped and expected to exceed $100 million in subscriptions.
• Led the legal advisory for a $20 million strategic investment round that included Binance Labs, negotiating side letters, most-favored-nation waivers, and rights of first offer directly opposite Binance’s in-house legal team and tier-one venture counsel. The engagement continued a multiyear relationship spanning the client’s seed and Series A rounds through its token generation event, and required coordinating an international investor base across the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the European Union, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.
• Served as lead outside counsel to a Cayman-domiciled liquid restaking protocol on U.S. market entry, producing a 50-state money transmission and licensing survey covering banking-partnership structures, NMLS and FinCEN registration, agency exceptions, and geofencing. Analyzed federal preemption under the GENIUS Act and the noncustodial architecture of the protocol’s borrow product, and structured alignment mechanics between token holders and equity holders in advance of potential liquidity events.
• Built a comprehensive 50-state regulatory compliance roadmap for a decentralized exchange, addressing money transmission licensing, stablecoin exposure, AML and KYC frameworks, custody, and alternative-trading-system registration. Advised on product sequencing and launch strategy and later guided an offshore wind-down, including token unlock and burn sequencing and residual securities-law timing analysis.
• Served as lead counsel on the structuring and launch of a Solana-based celebrity token launchpad, designing the “culture coin” model to eliminate the insider allocations and bonding-curve mechanics that had drawn regulatory scrutiny to earlier celebrity launches. Conducted Howey and state money-transmission analysis, developed enforceable creator agreements for the platform’s high-profile talent, and coordinated its public launch.
• Advised the Cayman foundation company governing a decentralized infrastructure protocol on the restructuring of its DAO governance, authoring on-chain governance reforms, and advising on foundation succession planning, proxy directorship structures, grant-program participant structuring, and Cayman reporting obligations, while balancing the protocol’s decentralized governance model against the legal requirements of maintaining a regulated foundation company.