Tammy Fisher
General Counsel, Arbitrum Gaming Ventures
Tammy, you built your entire career in crypto and Web3, which barely existed when you graduated from law school. What initially brought you into this industry when most lawyers were still avoiding it?
My legal career in crypto started largely because I held and very casually traded crypto a couple of years before I even began practising law in this space. A friend introduced me to Vitalik Buterin’s ideas, the Ethereum network, and its premise, and the concept seemed interesting, so I bought some ETH in 2019 and just held on to it. Then, in 2020, BTC followed as well.
By that time, I started my career in criminal and white collar defence, and my friends who were actively trading in crypto told me about DAOs and the various interesting legal issues that were emerging around corporate governance, securities, AML, and so on.
As ETH gained in value, fully on-chain DAO treasuries also started growing, with some reaching tens of millions of dollars in size, which was huge at the time. That’s when I began writing on governance topics for dxDAO, which was associated with Gnosis. The DAO posted everything on an online forum, and a lot of intriguing legal questions started coming up around dividends and other issues.
I let other contributors to the DAO know that I had a legal background and started doing research on all these novel finance topics, which eventually led me to take on the position of legal advisor there.
So it sounds like your entry into the field was very community-driven. As you moved from advising DAOs openly to becoming an official counsel inside one, how did the transition change your approach to legal leadership?
Being a legal advisor to a DAO that did not want to operate as a traditional legal entity was certainly not a typical attorney-client relationship. Any advice I provided to the contributors was publicly shared. So I often wrote public-facing posts about legal research that drew on the counsel I’d hire in jurisdictions like Switzerland, the UK, and the US.
The goal was to explore questions: whether a DAO operating a decentralised prediction market could operate in the US, how contractors based in the EU could be paid by an on-chain treasury, what AML laws a DAO should comply with, or how to create on-chain contractual commitments for grants and other investments in projects the DAO supported. All of this research would become public discourse, requiring consensus-building from contributors who would vote for or against certain legal issues.
When I moved to a US-based startup, everything became much more traditional — in the sense that there was attorney-client privilege, a CEO and investors. There was a clear hierarchical structure in how decisions were made and a much clearer understanding of the relevant stakeholders.
That’s an interesting contrast in decision-making processes. Now, Tammy, as General Counsel at AGV, you’re not just managing risks — you’re shaping how a $200M initiative operates. How would you say this role influenced you personally?
I was initially drawn to a venture fund environment because of the role investors and fund counsel can play as true partners to builders — not just in structuring deals, but in helping navigate complex problems that often don’t have clear definitions. In crypto and gaming, especially, many of the ideas teams pursue don’t fit neatly into existing legal frameworks, so the role becomes much more about guidance than gatekeeping.
That has shaped how I think about being a lawyer. I spend a lot of time helping founders and internal teams work through ambiguity: looking at parallel industries, pressure-testing assumptions, and finding ways to move forward that are both innovative and responsible. It’s less about saying “no” and more about figuring out how something can be done thoughtfully and responsibly.
On a more personal level, the structure of AGV has also pushed me to grow in how I operate day-to-day. We sit at the intersection of a venture fund and a broader DAO ecosystem, which means there are multiple stakeholders with different perspectives and incentives. You’re rarely in a position to make decisions in isolation; you have to build alignment, communicate clearly, and balance patience with the need to execute quickly.
That dynamic has made me much more intentional about how I approach decision-making. It’s not just about what’s legally correct; it’s about helping drive outcomes that make sense for the organisation as a whole while bringing people along in the process.
Seeing as you mentioned navigating a lot of ambiguity — operating in the crypto space means that by default, the law is still being written, evolving in real time. In your practice, what kind of leadership does such an environment demand, and how have you needed to adapt to it?
When I first started in crypto as a lawyer, there existed no case law, let alone properly developed regulation, to rely on — even though that’s how I was trained in law school to determine what advice I should give my clients.
Without clear rules, I found myself in an extremely interesting position. As the people I worked with kept inventing exotic financial products and technical mechanisms that the law did not consider, I had to think about what best practices could be borrowed from parallel industries.
In order to develop a sense for what those best practices were, I went looking into government guidance — usually from administrative agencies in the US — emerging policy organisations like the Blockchain Association and CCI, and other lawyers in the space that were posting their thoughts on Twitter. Over time, as you keep looking into these matters, you begin to recognise the same voices when they go public with new insights, which helps build professional relationships and discourse among fellow legal practitioners in the ecosystem.
This type of environment demands a leader to be curious, comfortable with unclear answers, and to have the ability to research beyond one area of the law. You need to build relationships in legal circles and with policy organisations that are actively thinking about these issues. When a new issue comes up, you need to know who to run it by; whose counsel to seek — and turning to the same individual expert or group may not always be the best choice.
Because legal issues here are rarely clear, you always need to research similar cases and patterns in order to develop a clear internal compass for what would likely cause problems for your client, and what would not. Having worked both as a defence attorney and an advisor for novel legal issues, I generally advise clients that if their startup succeeds, they should expect to be scrutinised for how they’ve approached both legal and ethical issues along the way.
With all of this in mind, I see legal leadership in crypto as a position that demands as much creativity as the technologists who invent such interesting products. I generally approach legal review with the mindset of “how can this be done in a legally compliant way?”
That’s an excellent insight into this subject, thank you! Building on that, what developments do you think will shape the future of Web3 gaming over the next few years? From both a legal and industry perspective?
From an industry perspective, I think the biggest shift will be a move away from “Web3-first” games toward games that are simply good products, while blockchain acts as an enabling layer rather than the core identity. The most successful teams, in my opinion, will be the ones that focus on gameplay, retention, and real user value first, and then use on-chain elements selectively to enhance ownership, interoperability, or monetisation in ways that feel seamless to players.
On the legal and infrastructure side of things, I think we’ll see more practical use cases emerge around transfers of value and ownership. That includes everything, from stablecoin-based payments across jurisdictions to more seamless ownership of in-game assets — even if we stop calling them NFTs.
At the same time, changes in platform dynamics, like evolving app store policies and potential new marketplaces, could open doors for alternative distribution and monetisation models. Alongside that, areas like AI, data privacy, and age-based protections will continue to evolve quickly, especially given fragmented regulatory frameworks.
Identity is also an interesting area to watch: there is potential for on-chain solutions that allow not just for KYC, but for privacy-preserving ways to verify things like age or access parameters.
Overall, the space is moving toward more integrated, infrastructure-level use cases instead of crypto being treated as the product in itself.
Finally, for women in law who are curious about Web3 but don’t know where to start, what advice would you give?
I would say: start by actually using the products. If something interests you, try it, tinker with it, understand how it works. It’s the same mindset as investing — you can’t really evaluate something if you haven’t engaged with it directly.
On the legal side, focus less on formal resources and more on primary materials: SEC guidance, court filings, and regulatory commentary. This area is evolving in real time, so a lot of the most useful insights are coming from practitioners actively writing and sharing perspectives. Follow what genuinely interests you, and build from there.
