Chante Eliaszadeh

Chanté Eliaszadeh is a Los Angeles crypto and fintech attorney and the founder and principal of Astraea Counsel APC, a California boutique law firm advising crypto, AI, and fintech companies on securities regulation, digital-asset structuring, and emerging-technology compliance, and representing them in related disputes. She is named to the 2026 Lawdragon 500 X — The Next Generation guide for Crypto Regulation, Disputes, and Blockchain. Astraea Counsel is ranked in Chambers USA: Spotlight 2026 for Fintech (Los Angeles).

Chanté Eliaszadeh served as a summer honors intern in the SEC's Cyber Unit (San Francisco Regional Office) during law school, where she drafted deficiency letters to non-compliant issuers, investigated token offerings, authored regulatory memoranda on blockchain exchange-traded funds, and proposed preliminary ICO oversight rules. That inside view of how the SEC analyzes crypto offerings informs how she prepares clients for regulatory scrutiny, responds to regulatory investigations, and structures offerings for compliance today.

Before founding Astraea Counsel, Eliaszadeh practiced at White & Case LLP and Dechert LLP. At White & Case she worked on some of the most consequential crypto legal matters of the last decade — the FTX, Genesis Global Capital, and Celsius Network bankruptcies — representing creditors in Genesis and Celsius and a buyer and an ad hoc creditor group in FTX. She also closed Regulation D private placements for digital-asset companies, counseled financial institutions on stablecoin issuance, and led regulatory change-in-control processes for multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. At Dechert, she structured tokenized securities offerings, supported broker-dealer registration efforts, and drafted legal opinions for DeFi protocols.

Eliaszadeh serves as outside general counsel to blockchain, AI, and fintech companies, and counsels token issuers, funds, and platforms on SEC/CFTC classification, exemption pathways, and enforcement posture. Her crypto practice covers multi-state money transmitter licensing, stablecoin compliance under the GENIUS Act, token-launch securities analysis, digital-asset custody frameworks, DAO governance and structure, Wells Notice response and regulatory investigation defense, FinCEN MSB registration and AML/KYC program design, and California's Digital Financial Assets Law. Her AI practice covers California frontier-AI compliance under SB 53, federal AI compliance, and training-data copyright, along with entity formation and governance for crypto and AI companies.

Eliaszadeh is the author of "The Regulation of Stablecoins in the United States" in Global Legal Insights: Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Regulation (2024 and 2025 editions), and co-authored "A New 'Operation Choke Point'? The Quickly Constricting Rules on Crypto Activities for Banks" in The Banking Law Journal, which won the 2024 Law360 Distinguished Legal Writing Award from The Burton Awards (as co-author at White & Case). Her recognitions also include selection as a California Bar Foundation Diversity Scholar, the Robert Barr Scholar award at Berkeley Law, and Regional Champion and Global Finalist honors in the IBM Global Legal Hackathon.

She presented on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act at Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul, has spoken on crypto legal developments at the American Bar Association Business Law Section Spring Meetings (2025 and 2026), spoke at ETHDenver 2023 on legal issues in crypto bankruptcies, and delivered a keynote at the Computational Law & Blockchain Festival; other appearances include Art Basel Miami and Berkeley Law.

At Berkeley Law, Eliaszadeh served as Online Content Editor of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, was a Form + Fund Fellow, and co-founded and led Blockchain at Berkeley Law — the first blockchain law club — a 100-plus-member organization that advised city government. She holds a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is admitted to the State Bar of California (Bar No. 335803).