Back in the summer of 2017, when Natalie Grunfeld Furman was contemplating her next career move after having spent more than a decade in Big Law on the heels of a stint working for Silicon Valley startups during the dot-com bubble, people kept nudging her to consider the cryptocurrency industry.

“They were saying, ‘This is the hot new thing,’” Furman recalls. But it wasn’t her thing. Not at first. The Columbia Law School grad who had focused on trademark litigation at Paul Hastings saw the crypto world as a Wild West of vague or nonexistent regulations and pump-and-dump schemes.