Taylor Lindman spent years as Chainlink Labs' deputy GC. Now she's chief counsel for the SEC's crypto task force. That gap matters.
A Chainlink Lawyer Is Now Writing SEC Crypto Rules
There's a particular kind of appointment that the crypto industry has gotten very good at producing — the industry-to-regulator move that looks like a normal career transition until you map out exactly who it involves and what they know.
Taylor Lindman spent years at Chainlink Labs as deputy general counsel, part of the core legal team that shaped how one of the most infrastructure-critical protocols in DeFi thought about regulatory risk, securities exposure, and compliance architecture. She was present at formal SEC crypto task force meetings as recently as March 2025, sitting on the industry side of the table when Chainlink Labs met with task force staff to discuss approaches to crypto asset regulation. Now she's chief counsel for that same task force.
The seat she's taking has its own story. Michael Selig held the chief counsel role since the task force was formally staffed in early 2025. In October, Trump tapped him to lead the CFTC — a move confirmed by the Senate in December. Selig went from writing the SEC's crypto legal framework to running the agency that's increasingly expected to take primary oversight of crypto markets under the current administration's regulatory vision. His replacement at the task force is now someone who spent years advising a major crypto protocol on exactly the questions the task force is trying to answer.
That continuity isn't accidental. The task force under Commissioner Hester Peirce was built from the start around people with genuine industry proximity — Coin Center policy alum Landon Zinda on staff, external roundtables pulling in protocol founders and asset managers, formal consultation meetings with Chainlink, Uniswap, Coinbase, and others. The philosophy has been explicit: clarity requires people who understand what they're regulating from the inside.
The counterargument writes itself. Regulatory capture is a real phenomenon, and having protocol lawyers write disclosure frameworks and registration pathways for the asset class they just came from is a legitimate concern — one that consumer advocates and academic critics of the current SEC posture have raised consistently. The task force has no enforcement mandate; it's a rulemaking and framework-development body. But the frameworks it produces will shape who has to register, how, and under what conditions. Having someone with Chainlink Labs' institutional knowledge in that room is not a neutral fact.
What I find genuinely interesting about the Lindman appointment is the specific relevance of Chainlink's regulatory positioning to what the task force is actually working on. Chainlink's core infrastructure — oracle networks, CCIP cross-chain messaging, tokenized asset data feeds — sits at the intersection of several of the thorniest questions in crypto securities law. Is LINK a security? Are oracle services financial infrastructure? How do tokenized RWA frameworks interact with existing SEC disclosure requirements? These aren't abstract questions for Lindman. They're the questions she spent her career working through from the other side.
$LINK moved upward on the news. That reaction is the market pricing in perceived proximity to favorable rulemaking, which is how markets behave when they think someone with institutional knowledge just moved inside the tent. Whether that translates into concrete regulatory clarity for Chainlink specifically — or accelerates the broader task force agenda on tokenization and DeFi frameworks — depends on how much latitude the task force actually has versus how much the legislative calendar (GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act, market structure bills) sets the pace regardless.
The revolving door between crypto industry legal teams and the regulatory apparatus has been turning consistently since early 2025. Lindman is the latest and arguably most direct example of how the line between industry advocate and rulemaker has become genuinely thin in the current cycle. Whether that produces better regulation or captured regulation is the question the next twelve months of task force output will start to answer.