Joshua L. Boehm

Josh Boehm is a partner in the Global Fintech & Payments practice of Paul Hastings and is based in the firm’s New York office. His practice focuses on advising innovative companies on regulatory and commercial issues involving financial technology, with a focus on blockchain-based products and services.

Mr. Boehm maintains one of the nation’s leading practices in obtaining special-purpose bank and trust charters for digital asset companies. In 2015, he helped charter the first New York state trust company approved to support digital assets. Since then, Mr. Boehm has secured state trust charters and licenses for multiple other digital asset custodians and exchanges. More recently, in 2021, he helped a client become the first national trust bank approved to provide digital asset custody services. Mr. Boehm provides ongoing counsel to these fast-growing clients, including with respect to their new products and services.

Mr. Boehm regularly advises clients in launching other commercial platforms powered by blockchain-based tokens, involving decentralized advertising, cloud storage, video gaming, motion picture distribution, and virtual reality imaging. Based on that experience, clients have increasingly sought his counsel on regulatory and licensing issues involving non-fungible tokens (NFT) and their use in metaverse and other “web3” environments. For example, Mr. Boehm recently advised a leading sportswear brand in its acquisition of a company that creates NFTs.

Mr. Boehm also has broad experience counseling clients on emerging payments technology, including those related to U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins. As part of this work, he frequently engages with state and federal regulators and negotiates complex commercial agreements. For instance, Mr. Boehm helped a social media company obtain a groundbreaking no-action letter from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff, enabling the client to create and sell a transferable payments token.

As a former federal appellate law clerk, Mr. Boehm also advises clients in enforcement matters involving financial regulatory issues.

Active in several industry groups and legal reform initiatives, including the Uniform Law Commission’s work involving digital assets, Mr. Boehm often speaks at conferences on financial technology and regulatory issues. He has also published related articles in the Cornell Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, the Harvard Business Law Review, and the Harvard International Law Journal, which have been cited in leading academic journals and practitioner treatises.

Mr. Boehm previously served as a law clerk to Judge Sandra S. Ikuta of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He also worked for Promontory Financial Group in Washington, D.C., where he advised banks and broker-dealers on risk management issues during the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath.