Alex Levine, chief legal officer with TokenSoft Inc.

Fintech startup TokenSoft Inc. has lured cryptocurrency compliance guru Alex Levine away from the general counsel role he took at Pangea Money Transfer earlier this year. 

"Everything moves here much faster than the regular world. To me it's just another great opportunity to help a company grow," Levine said Tuesday, his second day as TokenSoft's first chief legal officer.

Earlier in his career, Levine served as a senior counsel for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In his new role, he is focused on federal regulatory issues while TokenSoft's general counsel, Lawson Baker, oversees the operational aspects of the legal department. 

Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based TokenSoft has created a platform that allows issuers of cryptocurrency or digital assets to comply with SEC regulations. 

Meanwhile, Pangea, which is headquartered in Chicago, operates a platform for transferring money using mobile devices. Levine said the firm, which is now searching for a new general counsel, hired him to "help them move into the crypto blockchain." 

"I think as time went on they were sort of not in the position to really take advantage of that as fast as they thought otherwise," Levine said. "My skill set really is on the federal regulatory side, not the state regulatory side." 

Levine added, "The regulatory framework for blockchain, cryptocurrency, digital assets is going to be moving very fast in the next couple years and I wanted to go back to a place that has more of a touchpoint in the SEC and CFTC regulatory sphere so I could be part of that development." 

An attempt to speak with a Pangea representative was not immediately successful.

Levine also serves as president of TokenSoft's affiliate transfer agent, Digital Transfer Agent Corp., or DTAC, which recently received approval from the SEC.

Levine began his career in 2002 as an associate at Kirkland & Ellis before joining the SEC in 2008 as a senior counsel. At the SEC, he oversaw investigations on hedge fund misconduct, investment adviser fraud, market manipulation, insider trading and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

As a senior regulatory counsel at the CFTC, Levine had a hand in the rulemaking process under the Dodd-Frank Act. He left the agency in 2013 and entered the in-house realm as general counsel for Chicago investment firm Gladius Capital Management. He went on to fill in-house leadership roles for a series of fintech firms—LedgerX, Circuit Capital and TrustToken—before joining Pangea and, now, TokenSoft.

TokenSoft CEO Mason Borda said in a prepared statement that hiring Levine "was an important step for TokenSoft to ensure our customers receive best-in-class compliance tooling for security token issuances.

"Alex's regulatory and blockchain experience will ensure our transfer agent offering can meet the complex compliance needs of all security offerings," he added.