For a crypto exchange, a clear set of rules can be a competitive advantage rather than a burden. That is how Laure Fouin, associate general counsel for Coinbase in Canada, frames the registered-dealer regime that has governed Canadian crypto trading platforms for years – well before US lawmakers began assembling anything comparable.
From private practice to a single client
Fouin joined Coinbase in late 2024 after 11 years as a securities lawyer, first at McCarthy Tétrault LLP and later at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, where she co-chaired the digital assets and blockchain group. Those years taught her to treat unfamiliar technology with familiar discipline. Even when a product is unprecedented, she says, the legal analysis stays “grounded in core principles of what is proper risk management, how to look for precedent and then make your own statutory interpretations.”
What pulled her in-house was the chance to stop handing off the analysis and start owning the outcome. After years advising everyone from large financial institutions to early-stage startups, she wanted a single client and a seat at the table. She wanted to be “more embedded in the business, the decision, the strategy and having an impact.”
Her mandate has since widened well beyond the country in her title. Fouin describes her role as a “strategic bridge” between Coinbase’s global product engine and “Canada’s localized regulatory framework,” translating a worldwide product roadmap through a Canadian commercial and regulatory lens. She is also responsible for Bermuda legal, where Coinbase holds a licence with the Bermuda Monetary Authority that serves more than 70 markets, and she aligns weekly with counsel across jurisdictions, including Australia, India, Singapore, Brazil, the EU and the UK.
Why Canada’s crypto framework is an advantage
In Canada, Coinbase operates as a restricted dealer with the Ontario Securities Commission as its principal regulator, and that status sets the rhythm of her work. Every decision must preserve a transparent, compliant relationship with regulators – a discipline she argues the broader industry lacked elsewhere for too long, since the US, Coinbase’s main market, had no comparable regulator or framework until recently. The upshot, she says, is that “the main driver of anything is compliance and that relationship,” with legal sitting inside product development rather than beside it. “Legal and compliance within Coinbase is integral to the product lifecycle from day one,” she says. Canadian securities regulators reinforce the point when they urge crypto trading platforms to prioritize compliance with securities laws.
That early clarity is why Fouin pushes back on the idea that Canada always trails the US in tech. She points to the principles-based posture of Canadian regulators, who set workable conditions once they understand and can address the risks. She says the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, now moving through Congress and clearing the Senate Banking Committee in May 2026, is the Americans working toward a registration regime for crypto trading platforms that Canada has already had in place for years.
Balancing secure and efficient access
For customers, Fouin keeps returning to two words: secure and efficient. The friction of buying a single bitcoin remains real, and she wants onboarding to feel as easy as any other app, but she will not trade safety for speed. Unregistered offshore platforms and bad actors make know-your-client (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) controls non-negotiable. “I also want to remove the anxiety that a lot of Canadians still have from entering that space,” she says – the fear of unknowingly enabling money laundering or terrorism financing.
Building toward the everything exchange
The harder part of the job is everything Coinbase cannot yet do in Canada. “Coinbase wants to be the everything exchange,” she says – tokenized equities, traditional equities, prediction markets and a range of other products, much of which has no clear domestic path. Her answer is a multi-year campaign rather than a quick fix, and most of her time goes to mapping how each new product could be authorized, working backward from the Canadian rules and forward from the global roadmap on what she calls a two-year view.
She sees an outsized opportunity for Canada in that work, at a time when surveys show Canadian investors ramping up their crypto asset engagement. With global confidence in the US shifting, she argues, Canada’s standing as a stable G7 jurisdiction could let a Canadian-dollar stablecoin claim real space in international money markets – useful for government finances and for people in volatile economies who want a reliable store of value. “I see a huge opportunity there that is outsized compared to Canada’s size and population,” she says.
What AI cannot replace
That ambition shapes what she wants from external counsel: Technical command of securities and financial regulation is now the baseline, and judgment is the differentiator. AI can already surface and summarize the relevant rules, she notes, so a firm’s value lies elsewhere. “What I need from outside counsel is advice based on my risk appetite, based on my business priorities,” she says.
Fouin is candid about how she uses AI and where it fails, having trained an agent to attack her own analysis rather than flatter it, which she finds genuinely useful. The danger she watches for is what she calls “AI dumping” – accepting machine output without checking it – and she has seen tools cite statutory provisions that simply do not exist when she checks the source. “Legal cannot ever do this,” she says, and that gap is why she believes lawyers “won’t be replaced as quickly as people think.” The same caution surfaces as lawyers weigh AI’s impact on dispute resolution.
Her advice to lawyers eyeing an in-house move is to be sure they are driven by what drives her: Success comes from being a business partner, not just a lawyer. She points to her colleague and Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal as the model, someone whose legal training frames his thinking but whose product is “trusted advice, guidance, strategy.” Getting there takes curiosity about the business and a willingness to ask. “Don’t fear asking stupid questions,” she says.