Head of Legal

The 4 Biggest Blockchain Strengths Are Also Its Weaknesses

The permissionless nature leads to fragmentation of meaning

Decentralization leads to too many standards

Immutability leads to exponential data + query infrastructure complexity

Neutrality means that no one is accountable for interpretations

Blockchain data is public. It is not usable at institutional scale. Despite being open, blockchain data is fragmented, hard to interpret, and painful to maintain. Even a simple question like "Who are the largest Ethereum token holders over time?" can require running nodes, ingesting full chain history, decoding contracts, cleaning edge cases, and writing complex SQL.

Blockchains Are Optimized for Writes, Not Reads

They are built for consensus and execution, not searchability, standardization, or financial interpretation. Blockchains are computers, not databases. Every protocol defines its own schema. The same economic action can be encoded in dozens of different ways. The result:

• Fragmented standards
• Exponential complexity
• No accountability for interpretation
• Events without economic meaning

Finance cannot operate on that, it needs an effective system of record.

Allium Is Building the System of Record for Onchain Finance

Allium ingests, verifies, and standardizes data across 140+ blockchains and 30+ petabytes of history. We close four structural gaps that prevent blockchains from becoming systems of record:

• Semantic Gap: Translating raw events into financial concepts like payments, trades, deposits, and staking income
• Standardization Gap: Mapping thousands of protocols into a single canonical cross chain schema
• Infrastructure Gap: Read optimized, globally distributed data at web scale
• Accountability Gap: Auditable methodology, SLAs, and SOC 1 and 2 compliance

The result is a neutral, canonical data layer institutions can build on with confidence.

Finance Is Moving Onchain

Stablecoins, tokenized assets, trading, staking, and lending are growing rapidly. Institutions need a trusted source of truth for onchain financial activity, just as they rely on Bloomberg or DTCC in traditional markets. Raw blockchains cannot serve that role.

As AI agents begin transacting autonomously, the requirement becomes even stricter. Agents cannot reason over raw event logs. They need structured data, attribution, condition checks, and auditability.

Allium is the read layer that makes onchain finance usable for humans and machines.

Who We Serve

Allium powers three core personas with the same canonical data foundation:

1. Finance, Accounting, and Risk Teams They need reliable, audit grade answers. They rely on Allium for financial reporting, reconciliation, compliance, risk monitoring, and defensible metrics that can stand up to auditors and regulators.

2. Engineers and Product Teams They need low latency, production ready infrastructure. They use Allium to power wallets, trading systems, payment rails, staking infrastructure, and real time applications that cannot break.

3. Strategy, Research, and Executive Teams They need clarity and insight. They use Allium to understand ecosystem economics, market structure, user behavior, competitive dynamics, and where capital is flowing onchain. And of course...agents. Our customers and users include Visa, Stripe, G-SIB Banks, Big 4 Accounting firms, BCG, Coinbase, Phantom, Uniswap and cited by the Federal Reserve.

About the Role

You'll own our day-to-day legal work and build the practices that support Allium as we grow. Your initial focus will be commercial contracts, data licensing, and technology transactions. Data rights are central to our business: permitted use, redistribution, derived data, and AI all shape what we can build and how we serve customers.

You'll work closely with our founders and leaders across Finance, Sales, Product, and Engineering, with outside counsel available for specialist matters and additional capacity. This role suits someone who enjoys personally drafting and negotiating agreements while building a legal function at a Series B startup. You'll have substantial ownership from the start and a direct role in how Allium builds products, structures partnerships, and serves customers.

What You'll Do

• Lead commercial contracting. Draft and negotiate enterprise customer agreements, data licenses, partnerships, and vendor contracts. Work with Sales and Finance to resolve issues and move deals through to signature.

• Shape our data and IP rights. Establish practical positions on data acquisition, permitted use, redistribution, derived data, AI use, and post-termination rights. Align supplier rights with the commitments we make to customers.

• Advise on products and partnerships. Work with Product and Engineering early on new offerings. Translate privacy, IP, and regulatory considerations into clear recommendations that help teams make decisions.

• Build legal operations. Develop templates, negotiation playbooks, approval guidelines, intake workflows, and a reliable contract repository. Use AI and automation thoughtfully, with appropriate confidentiality protections and human review.

• Coordinate broader legal needs. Partner with leadership and outside counsel on corporate governance, financings, employment matters, compliance, and other issues as they arise. Manage priorities, specialist support, and legal spend.

• Make obligations actionable. Help teams understand the commitments in our contracts and policies, and work with the right owners to put them into practice.

What We're Looking For

• Strong experience independently leading complex commercial negotiations for a technology, SaaS, financial data, or related business.

• Depth in data licensing or technology transactions, including IP rights, data use, confidentiality, liability, indemnification, and privacy provisions.

• Experience advising business teams directly, ideally in-house, and translating legal analysis into clear decisions and workable alternatives.

• A track record of building or improving legal templates, playbooks, and processes, with sound judgment about when to push and when to bring in specialist counsel.

• Clear writing, strong negotiation skills, and trusted working relationships with technical and commercial teams.

• Ownership and adaptability: you can manage competing priorities, follow through on details, and create structure while staying close to the work.

• A J.D. or equivalent legal qualification and active admission to a U.S. state bar, with eligibility to practice in-house in the role's location.

Experience That Would Be Helpful

• Working in a small legal team or helping build a legal function.

• Financial market data, fintech, payments, AI, or blockchain-related products.

• Selling to financial institutions or other sophisticated enterprise buyers.

• Privacy, product counseling, or public-sector contracting.

What Some Cool People Have to Say About Us

• The Information's Top 50 Startups

• Mario Gabriele from The Generalist's Future 50 Startup List:

• Tomasz Tungus from Theory Ventures:

• Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins:

Ok, Now for Some Tough Love. Here Are the Values We Strive For at Allium:

• Obsessiveness - The best people at Allium cannot put a problem down once they pick it up. We care more about the work than is strictly rational. Institutions trust us because our data is right. Right means caring about the small things. The decoded contract that ships with one wrong field. The label that is 99% accurate but wrong on the address that matters. The query that runs in 4 seconds when it should run in 400 milliseconds. Most companies tolerate these. We do not.

  Obsessiveness shows up as depth of care. It is not measured in hours worked or visible effort. You should feel something physical when work ships half-right. That instinct is what we hire for.