Rewiring Wall Street with Ethereum as General Counsel @etherealize_io. Previously at @Coinbase & DOJ, Law Professor @Ndlaw.
Joined October 2009
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May 14
I have a lot of thoughts on Clarity and Ethereum, but first time in my life I’ve been accused of working for an “advocacy organization”
May 14
Etherealize general counsel @syelderman on the Clarity Act in Fortune:
“I think it’s going to pass, based on all the great progress that has been made on both sides of Congress, and the support this bill is getting from the White House,” Steve Yelderman, general counsel of Ethereum-focused advocacy organization Etherealize, told Fortune. “That said, it’s Washington, and anything could happen.”
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Steve Yelderman retweeted
May 14
Etherealize general counsel @syelderman on the Clarity Act in Fortune:
“I think it’s going to pass, based on all the great progress that has been made on both sides of Congress, and the support this bill is getting from the White House,” Steve Yelderman, general counsel of Ethereum-focused advocacy organization Etherealize, told Fortune. “That said, it’s Washington, and anything could happen.”
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May 6
What makes blockchain technology neutral infrastructure (like a highway) and what makes it a regulated intermediary (like a bank)?
The debut episode of Proof of Research is now live feat. @SMULawSchool Professor @Prof_CarlaReyes & @Etherealize_io General Counsel @syelderman 🎙️
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May 1
Every redline tells a story
Apr 30
Today we’re introducing a new Legal Agent in @Microsoft Word, built to support the precision and rigor legal work demands. Every clause matters. Every redline tells a story. That’s why this agent was built to follow the structured workflows lawyers use while keeping them fully in control.
Early in my career, I asked for a computer on my desk because I believed technology could change how lawyers work. It did. Today, I believe this next generation of tools will do the same, grounded in trust and responsible use.
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Apr 21
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Mar 31
Last week, @TheDRC_ hosted Policy Day at @EYnews 10th Annual Global Blockchain Summit, and the takeaway was clear: digital asset policy is entering a consequential phase.
The conversation is no longer about whether digital assets are here to stay. It’s about whether policymakers and regulators can deliver rules that provide clarity, support innovation, and preserve the core benefits of decentralized technologies.
Grateful to join @_jikim, @Advocate4Web3, and @SH_Brennan to discuss the latest on the CLARITY Act and what meaningful market structure legislation could unlock.
We also heard strong insights from @syelderman and @fundstrat on institutional adoption, @MarinaMarkezic on EU regulatory developments, and @dao_officer and @kkirkbos on the barriers facing L2s and their critical role in the ecosystem.
I was especially glad to host Taylor Lindman for his first public engagement since becoming Chief Counsel of the @SECGov's Crypto Task Force, where we discussed the SEC’s new interpretive guidance and regulatory agenda.
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Mar 31
New Op-Ed from Etherealize General Counsel @syelderman in @CoinDesk on why privacy is the next regulatory frontier to onboard banks, asset managers and market makers.
"Much of our law already recognizes that financial privacy is not only an important civil liberty, but an essential economic good. Software developers and market participants do not need loopholes; they need to know what the law requires of them."
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Mar 19
NGL this hits too close to home
Mar 19
my friend at Anthropic said they’re routing your requests specifically to the dumbest model (his name is Steve and they made him by distilling a CVS receipt)
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Mar 11
Why don’t we just float individual barrels of oil down the Strait of Hormuz? There’s no way they can hit them all.
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Mar 10
Surrounding yourself with sycophants leads to:
* Dunning–Kruger effect
* Less critical thinking
* Loss of touch with reality
Never forget that most LLMs are explicitly trained to be sycophantic, because humans love feeling flattered. It's basically the AI industry's nicotine.
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Mar 3
I predict recipe subscriptions and actual recipe books are going to boom in the next few months / years. No one wants to cook literal slop suggested by AI.
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Feb 26
Just think of all the additional cases we’ll be able to litigate with all our newly productive lawyers
Feb 26
This is counterintuitive for some, which is why there’s a paradox named after it. But if you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate.
The process goes like this: every small business, every IT team, every large enterprise sees that engineering can now drive vastly more output. They then start to consider all the new things they can build or automate. They even test building prototypes themselves.
They only get so far with that approach because they realize there are still 50 other tasks that go into building software and maintaining it. So they start to hire more engineers to do that work. All of this for work they never would have considered automating or having software for if AI didn’t exist.
So yes, automating tasks, in plenty of fields, will lead to demand for experts, not less.
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Feb 25
1/ A brilliant insight: Execution is no longer the most important constraint on our output. Rather, it’s the ability to verify that work has actually been done correctly. It’s an inversion of scarcity between doers and supervisors. x.com/ccatalini/status/20263…
Feb 24
21/ Verification is the ultimate complement to abundant intelligence—and it is structurally scarce. In the agentic economy, durable advantage belongs not to those who generate output but to those who can certify it.
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Feb 25
5/ Now take that and replace your doctor, accountant, kid’s teacher, therapist, etc. Without an ability to measure performance, we are throwing ourselves to the wolves.
x.com/ccatalini/status/20263…
Feb 24
29/ This is Goodhart's Law with teeth—optimization treating every unmeasured dimension as an unconstrained degree of freedom.
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Feb 25
6/ This is the AI hype cycle I worry about. If we overbuild a few data centers, so be it. But if we hand over the keys and abandon human expertise in places that matter, we may not appreciate what we’ve lost until it’s too late.
x.com/ccatalini/status/20263…
Feb 24
34/ Runaway Risk Zone—cheap to automate, but unaffordable to verify. This is where the structural danger lives. And as the Measurability Gap widens, more of the economy migrates here.
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Feb 25
Wherever you are on the AI anxiety curve, stop what you're doing and read this thread.
This is the most coherent analysis of the true threats and opportunities of AI that I've seen.
Feb 24
1/ Some Simple Economics of AGI—🔥🧵
Right now, there is a low-grade panic running through the economy. Everyone is asking the same anxious question: what exactly is AI going to automate, and what will be left for us?
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Feb 11
Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position.
Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground.
This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt.
We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning.
We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most.
I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: randalolson.com/2026/02/07/t…
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