Coinbase hires Brian Brooks, former Fannie Mae executive VP and general counsel, as its chief legal officer
Crypto exchange Coinbase has hired a new chief legal officer in its ongoing push to grow its leadership team. — Brian Brooks, a former executive vice president …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Brooks hire lands mid-buildout: months earlier Coinbase brought in Emilie Choi from LinkedIn to run corporate development, signaling an exchange assembling a traditional-finance-grade executive bench while still young. What makes this particular hire notable in hindsight is where the legal seat led: Brooks left for the number-two job at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2020, then took the top job at rival Binance in 2021.
Coinbase has since treated the role as a marquee recruit — Facebook's Paul Grewal succeeded Brooks in 2020 and is only now stepping down after six years, handing the function to VP of legal Molly Abraham. This 2018 announcement is the origin point of a legal-leadership pipeline that repeatedly crossed between crypto companies and US regulators.
First-order effects
- Coinbase gains a chief legal officer with Fannie Mae executive and general-counsel experience, hardening its legal and regulatory bench at a moment when it is scaling its leadership team.
Second-order effects
- Brooks's path out of the role — deputy head of the OCC, then Binance CEO — turned Coinbase's legal office into proof that exchange-side lawyers can move directly into banking regulation and back into crypto operators, raising the stakes for every subsequent CLO hire, including Grewal's.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's senior legal seats function less as counsel roles than as bridges between Washington and crypto firms — shaping how exchanges staff compliance ahead of regulatory fights like Coinbase's suit seeking SEC internal documents.
The trend: Crypto exchanges are staffing their top legal roles with veterans of regulated finance, and those hires increasingly circulate through the regulator-to-operator revolving door.