Jude Ogene

General Counsel & CCO, OpenNode  ·  Digital Assets  ·  African Markets  ·  AI-Native Legal

"The rules governing digital money, African financial infrastructure, and AI-native legal operations are all being written at once. I work on getting them right."

I'm the General Counsel and CCO of OpenNode, a Bitcoin payments infrastructure company. My work sits at the convergence of three things in motion simultaneously: the emergence of open, programmable payment rails; the opportunity for African markets to leapfrog financial systems that were never built for them; and the transformation of legal and compliance functions by agentic AI.

Before OpenNode, I was the Chief Legal Officer of a global peer-to-peer crypto exchange — the kind of platform where digital assets and underserved markets actually meet. I began my career at Sullivan & Cromwell.

Africa is where the lessons are sharpest. But the conclusions travel.

Digital Asset Regulation
Payment flow architecture, licensing strategy, BSA/AML compliance, and regulatory positioning for digital asset infrastructure companies.
African Financial Infrastructure
Policy frameworks, regulatory engagement, and market architecture across sub-Saharan Africa — with deep focus on Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya.
Bitcoin & Stablecoin Settlement
Settlement rail design, the complementarity of Bitcoin/Lightning and stablecoin infrastructure, and implications for remittance markets and monetary sovereignty.
AI-Native Legal Operations
Building legal and compliance functions where agentic AI does substantive work — and thinking through the governance frameworks that make that possible.

All writing at medium.com/@ogenec

If you're building regulatory frameworks, payment infrastructure, or institutional policy in the digital asset space — or thinking seriously about what financial architecture should look like for markets that get to choose — I'd like to know you.