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Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission senior counsel Jake Prudhomme has joined Crypto Asset Rating Inc. as the financial technology startup's first chief legal officer. 

"The legal and compliance team, for now, is me," he said Wednesday in an interview.

Prudhomme joined the two-year-old firm earlier this month and will be based in Washington, D.C. The company, which announced Prudhomme's hiring on Tuesday, is headquartered in New York and is part of a growing industry that is developing ratings systems for the largely unregulated crypto and blockchain markets. 

"What this space needs is an honest broker. It needs an independent voice for reliable information," Prudhomme said. "There are many companies in the blockchain community giving a lot of thought to governance. But notwithstanding that, I don't think anyone has taken head-on the problem of the lack of quality information for investors." 

The firm aims to help investors gauge the long-term viability of crypto assets and the companies issuing those assets by using a rating systems based on 150 factors in 15 different categories. The four major categories are business, financial, technology and legal risks, according to Prudhomme. 

For instance, he said the ratings system would consider the industry in which a company floating a crypto asset was entering, its business strategy, and the strength of its management team.

Prudhomme is overseeing legal and regulatory matters for the firm while building a compliance program that will integrate best practices from SEC-regulated credit rating agencies to ensure that the integrity of the ratings process is not compromised. 

The company's CEO, Pramod Attarde, said in a prepared statement that the firm "must have an extremely robust compliance program to ensure we avoid even the suggestion that we would compromise our analytics for profit."

Prudhomme added that the firm also plans to float its own crypto token in the "near term" through its Crypto Capital Access Platform. 

"We hope that the process that we follow will be a model for others who hope to avail themselves of the token process," he said. 

During his six years with the SEC, Prudhomme focused on equities market structure and credit rating agency regulation. He left the agency in 2014 and joined S&P Global Ratings as a senior director and head of North American compliance. 

He also has served as a senior director at Freddie Mac and most recently was with Corcoran Regulatory Advisors, where he was a principal who advised blockchain and fintech companies on regulatory issues.