Flavia Kenyon

Barrister at 33 Chambers. Law and Technology, digitalisation of trade and companies, FinTech, AI

[Bill Hughes 🦊 @BillHughesDC]

SEC Commissioner @HesterPeirce gave a short but pointed speech yesterday at a Georgetown Law conference on privacy-enhancing technologies. In short, she said the quiet part out loud (thankfully):
regulators have spent too long treating privacy demands as suspicious, when in fact privacy-preserving financial technology protects people from bad actors at least as much as it shields them from shoulder-peering regulators.

Privacy and investor protection, she argues, are not in conflict.

The most interesting idea in the speech was that transfer agents currently must record the name and physical address of securities holders. She suggested giving transfer agents the flexibility to record instead that securities reside at a public blockchain address, which by design carries no personally identifiable information. That would eliminate a whole category of PII honeypots and reduce the data exposure risk that comes with holding tokenized securities today. And the idea certainly makes the MOAR REPORTING types shudder with disgust.

For self-custody wallets, the implication is significant. It would remove one of the structural barriers to holding tokenized securities outside a custodial intermediary. It could give them another meaningful feature.

For DeFi interfaces, the more directly relevant part of the speech was the invitation Peirce extended to builders: if you have technologies that can accomplish KYC and AML compliance objectives while minimizing PII collection and storage, she wants to hear from you through the Crypto Task Force. That is a real opening for the kind of portable, on-chain KYC attestation model that makes the most sense for non-custodial interfaces at scale, where collecting and warehousing underlying customer data is architecturally awkward and creates liability exposure the interface should not have.

It is one commissioner's speech, and that commissioner is leaving (😢), but it is notable that a sitting SEC commissioner is actively reframing privacy-preserving wallet and interface design as a feature worth accommodating rather than a compliance gap worth closing.

https://t.co/hQvex0P7W4

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Anthropic just integrated Harvey AI as a connector inside the same release that ships 12 plugins doing what Harvey does.

Harvey raised $200M in March at $11B. Legora raised $600M Series D last month. Their pitch: legal-specialized AI built on top of frontier models. That value capture only works if the model layer underneath stays neutral.

It didn't.

Tuesday's release: commercial counsel, employment counsel, litigation associate, plus 9 other practice-area plugins. Plus MCP connectors to Westlaw, CoCounsel, Box, Everlaw, DocuSign. The exact workflow stack Harvey and Legora built their valuations on, shipped natively inside Claude.

Then Anthropic integrated Harvey itself. Which makes Harvey a data source feeding into Claude.

The model layer said yes to powering Harvey. The model layer said yes to integrating Harvey. The model layer also said yes to shipping every product Harvey ships.

Per Anthropic AGC Mark Pike, legal is already the #1 power-user job function inside Cowork with 3x the usage of any other function. A single webinar on legal teams using Claude pulled 20,000 registrations.

Legal AI was already running on Anthropic. Tuesday removed the middleman.

The next $11B legal AI valuation is the one nobody raises.

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

‘When virtual gold becomes real world property’- read my article in Thomson Reuters https://t.co/KOZBF8qBgW

[David Davis MP @DavidDavisMP]

For those of you interested in jury trials, this is Parliament at its best. 👇

[Sovereign AI @UKSovereignAI]

Introducing Sovereign AI, the Government’s new £500m venture fund.

Sovereign AI will support founders from day one to start here, scale here and win everywhere.

https://t.co/frsEPhSDie

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

@RadBullXRD Here’s the link to the judgment https://t.co/s90Xu49umn

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

@RadBullXRD The ruling in Rv Lakeman has far reaching consequences beyond gaming and it can be extended to DeFi and any tokenised platform, and virtual economies.

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

@RadBullXRD Court of Appeal ruled Old School RuneScape in-game wealth/ gold coins = “property’ capable of being stolen. The Court made the distinction between the game’s source code and the instantiated data/ value recording the gold balance in players’ accounts https://t.co/TAGyTGWcVP…

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

@RadBullXRD I knew Dan, he was a true visionary of immense intellect. I had several very interesting conversations with him, and shared many views together about the future of tech, law, individual rights

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

@RadBullXRD ‘a token isn't a row in smb else's database. It's a first-class object in the system that behaves like a physical thing.’ - @RadBullXRD this is what I successfully argued in Court of Appeal in R v Lakeman: instantiated value, a new digital object with proprietary functionality.

[paul kenyon @paulkenyonTV]

I'm excited to share the cover of my latest book, China's African Empire. It's the story of China's stealth colonialism in Africa, from Mao's military training camps to China's creeping control of data. It's the follow-up to Dictatorland. Thanks to @HoZ_Books @BloomsburyBooks

[radbull.xrd @RadBullXRD]

https://t.co/kQbXrE4zbS

[NASA Webb Telescope @NASAWebb]

Light from the age of the dinosaurs 🦖

The light that Webb collected to create this image has been journeying to us from spiral galaxy NGC 5134 for 65 million years, or since soon after Tyrannosaurus rex went extinct!

https://t.co/OycR8tv6Gt

[Maria Avdeeva @maria_avdv]

Vladyslav Heraskevych disqualified.
Not even allowed to start.

But he has already won.
The world saw the names of Ukrainian athletes killed by Russia. And the hypocrisy of those who claim to stand for peace.

You can ban us from the track.
You cannot silence Ukraine.

[Hubble @NASAHubble]

Birds of a feather 🕊️

Hubble captured a pair of interacting galaxies that looks like a bird in flight! Astronomers believe these two galaxies will someday merge into a single galaxy.

Called ESO 593-8, this pair is located 650 million light-years away: https://t.co/4NO4EWkCBi

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

🚀 Court of Appeal ruled Old School RuneScape in-game wealth/ gold coins = “property’ capable of being stolen. The Court made the distinction between the game’s source code and the instantiated data/ value recording the gold balance in players’ accounts https://t.co/owxewDg7ek

[BBC News (UK) @BBCNews]

Google to pay $68m to settle lawsuit claiming it recorded private conversations https://t.co/ZssKIWyAW9

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

🚨 The Telegraph obtains unredacted plans showing how close the underground complex will come to cables carrying sensitive British financial data

Look at the uncovered plans below ⬇️
https://t.co/DO35bujFP2

[Gareth Corfield @GazTheJourno]

Revealed: The secret room beneath China's planned London mega-embassy that poses a threat to the City

Exclusive by me, the best graphics desk on Fleet Street and about 10,000 gallons of coffee. Link below 🧵

[Flavia Kenyon @FlaviaKenyon]

I couldn’t reply to this because of the settings as I’m not following him. So I’ve had to repost this: instead: I was about to like it until I realised who’s posted it… he’s damaged our beautiful city beyond recognition, and no amount of fireworks will put it right!

[Sadiq Khan @SadiqKhan]

Most incredible city in the world.

Most incredible fireworks in the world.

Happy New Year, London! ❤️🎉✨