Coin Center senior staff to step down at end of year

Crypto think tank Coin Center is making changes to its senior leadership, executive director Jerry Brito announced Monday.

Brito and Robin Weisman, senior policy counsel at the non-profit, will each step down from their respective positions at the end of the year. Both will remain on the board of directors, Brito said in a post on X. 

Brito and Weisman have held their respective positions since Coin Center’s inception in 2014. 

Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center’s current director of research, will take over as executive director on Jan. 1. Landon Zinda, who currently serves as policy counsel at Coin Center, will become the advocacy group’s policy director, Brito added. 

Read more: Crypto Hiring: Coinbase adds ex-SEC adviser to legal team

“I’ll leave my role at Coin Center very proud of what we’ve accomplished over the last 10 years,” Brito said. “When we started in 2014, it was not clear that governments would allow bitcoin to flourish. Bitcoin and crypto are technically unstoppable, yes, but in the short-term there was a lot of harm that could have been done and that many tried to do.”

The news comes weeks after Coin Center won its appeal to re-open its 2022 lawsuit against the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service. The suit was over an amendment to the US tax code that includes “digital assets” in the definition of cash, requiring individuals and businesses to report transactions exceeding $10,000. 

Coin Center, who alleged the amendment violates the Constitution, had its case dismissed originally, but the appeals court found in August that some of Coin Center’s arguments have a legal leg to stand on. 

Coin Center was also one of several crypto advocacy groups who filed amicus briefs in support of Tornado Cash and its founder in the US government’s lawsuit against two of the mixing services’ founders. 

The letter of support followed Coin Center’s own lawsuit against the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which it filed after the US sanctioned Tornado Cash. The court sided with the US government in 2023 , ruling that the agency was within its right to add Tornado Cash to its list of sanctioned entities.

Weisman in a post on X Monday said she was “incredibly grateful for the opportunity” to build Coin Center.

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