Chief Legal Officer and Chief Administrative Officer
MoonPay
Caroline D. Pham is Chief Legal Officer and Chief Administrative Officer at MoonPay. In her role, she oversees MoonPay’s global legal, compliance, risk, regulatory affairs, policy, governance, and enterprise administrative functions, helping strengthen the company’s operating foundation as it scales and expands into new markets and products.
An internationally recognized leader across regulation, capital markets, and digital assets, Caroline brings 25 years of experience in law, finance, and technology, including over a decade focused on crypto and blockchain. She is widely known for driving transformation in complex, high-stakes environments and for her expertise navigating evolving regulatory landscapes to support responsible innovation.
Prior to joining MoonPay, Caroline served as acting Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where she led an agency of more than 650 employees and oversaw a $365 million budget. She sponsored the CFTC’s Global Markets Advisory Committee, and was a member of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, and President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets.
As acting Chairman, Caroline delivered results on promoting innovation, providing regulatory clarity, simplifying rules, and ending regulation by enforcement. She advanced market structure including perpetual contracts, 24/7 trading, and prediction markets. Caroline launched the CFTC’s Crypto Sprint to implement the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets report recommendations, achieving historic milestones such as the first-ever spot crypto trading on U.S. federally regulated exchanges, digital asset pilot program, tokenized collateral and stablecoins guidance, and the CFTC Crypto CEO Forum and CEO Innovation Council.
Caroline’s modernization efforts include deploying the CFTC’s first automated market surveillance system, restructuring the agency’s organization and operations to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, and saving nearly $50 million in annualized costs.
Before the CFTC, Caroline was a Managing Director at Citigroup, where she held senior global leadership roles across Legal, Compliance, Citi Chief Administrative Office, and the Institutional Clients Group. She advised the Citigroup CEO, Board, and clients on strategy, risk, and innovation, served on firm-wide governance committees, and supported major shareholder and earnings communications and corporate disclosures. She also led implementation of enterprise-wide programs and helped shape Citi’s market structure and digital asset strategy, including partnerships, venture capital and strategic equity investments, and product development.
Caroline was named to CoinDesk’s Most Influential list in both 2023 and 2025. In 2025, she also received the 100 Impact Leaders Legacy Award from the Financial Club and UK US Crypto Alliance. Caroline has guest lectured on digital assets and blockchain at Stanford University and Columbia Business School. She earned a B.A. from UCLA and a certificate from UCLA Anderson School of Management and received her J.D. from The George Washington University Law School, where she served on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Business and Finance Law Program. She is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and has held many leadership roles in the American Bar Association and other industry organizations.
As stablecoins become poised to potentially dominate the settlement rail for on-chain finance, traditional financial institutions face a strategic inflection point: how to build, deploy, and scale an institutional-grade stablecoin strategy that positions them for leadership rather than displacement. With regulatory clarity increasing, tokenization infrastructures maturing, and corporate demand for real-time programmable liquidity rising, stablecoins are shifting rapidly from experimental to essential—and financial institutions must determine their strategic path forward.
The other significant challenge: TradFi technology stacks were not designed for on-chain operations, 24/7 liquidity, tokenized liabilities, or smart contract execution. A financial institution that wants to issue, support, or integrate stablecoins must build capabilities across five major infrastructure layers, each with subcomponents and strategic decisions.
This session brings together TradFi and crypto leaders to explore what it truly takes for a financial institution to operate on-chain. The panel will examine strategic decision-making around issuing versus partnering, the technical and operational infrastructure required to support regulated stablecoins, and how to safely integrate stablecoins into core banking, treasury, payments, and capital markets workflows.
The panel will also focus on liquidity models, interoperability between public and permissioned chains, risk and compliance frameworks, and the emerging business models that will shape competitive advantage. Panelists will share insights on how to sequence a stablecoin roadmap, where early value emerges for clients, and how to organize internally for execution across technology, risk, legal and treasury functions. Key points of the discussion will include: