Fannie Mae’s General Counsel quits to join Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is on a hiring spree and has announced the addition of a new member to its team.

Co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong on Thursday announced that the company has appointed Brian Brooks as the new Chief Legal Officer.

Brooks most recently served as Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of U.S. mortgage giant Fannie Mae, where he led the company’s 200-person legal department and government relations group, and acted as a senior advisor to the CEO and Board of Directors. Previously, he led the legal department at OneWest Bank, N.A., a regional depository institution that he helped sell to CIT Group, and prior to that he served as managing partner of O’Melveny & Myers LLP.

“His [Brooks] arrival is part of our effort to expand our legal, compliance and government affairs capabilities as we head into this next chapter for the company and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole,” Armstrong said.

Previously, Mike Lempres led the Coinbase’s legal function. Lempres will now focus on scaling the company’s government affairs program, which includes Coinbase as a founding member of the Blockchain Association and managing the Coinbase Political Action Committee.

In the past couple of months, Coinbase has added a number of prominent names to its team. This includes Amazon Web Services general manager Tim Wagner as Vice President of Engineering; former New York Stock Exchange executive Eric Scro as Vice President of Finance; LinkedIn's head of analytics and data science Michael Li as Vice President of Data, and others.