Gagnon joins from Franklin Templeton, where he was senior corporate council for the firm's institutional digital assets business
Dallas, TEXAS, Aug. 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Digital Ascension Group (DAG), a crypto family office service provider and wealth management firm built around digital assets, has named Robert Gagnon as General Counsel.
DAG Names Robert Gagnon General Counsel
Gagnon leads the legal function and works alongside the compliance team on regulatory matters across the group's businesses, including DAG Wealth, its SEC-registered investment adviser. His appointment follows a year of senior hiring at the firm, which added a Chief Investment Officer, a Chief Product and Strategy Officer and a Chief Compliance Officer earlier in 2026.
As DAG continues to expand crypto wealth management services, Gagnon's role is critical. Assets in an advisory account are generally required to be held with a qualified custodian. How that requirement applies to cryptocurrency has been one of the open questions for advisors in the space, and it shapes what a firm can offer clients who hold digital assets. Gagnon spent the past several years working on that question inside a large asset manager.
"Robert spent the last few years working through the hardest legal questions in digital assets inside one of the largest asset managers in the world, things like how the custody rule applies and what a fund actually needs in order to hold these assets," said Erin Friez, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Ascension Group. "That's the experience our team wanted in the room. A lot of what makes crypto hard for families and their advisors is a legal and operational problem before it's an investment problem, and the more of that groundwork gets built now, the better this space gets at serving people well."
Gagnon joins DAG from Franklin Templeton, where he served as Senior Corporate Counsel and was the primary legal contact for the firm's institutional digital assets business.
In that role he led the legal work to establish the firm's first unaffiliated staking fund and advised the business on how the SEC's custody rule applies to digital assets, including through industry trade association work that submitted comment to the SEC and its Crypto Task Force. He researched the federal and state requirements for minting stablecoins, including under the GENIUS Act, and negotiated trading and custody agreements with digital asset counterparties. He also supported the firm's US and offshore private funds, among them a digital asset only private fund, and served on its generative AI working committee.
At Natixis Investment Managers, Gagnon was Vice President and Associate General Counsel. He negotiated sub-advisory, managed account, model delivery and institutional agreements, handled Form ADV and Form CRS filings, chaired the firm's conflicts of interest group and sat on its operational compliance, investment oversight and executive committees.
At Arrowstreet Capital he was Head of Internal Assessment, where he ran the compliance program, led a firm-wide SEC examination preparedness initiative and represented the firm in regulatory examinations and SOC 1 audits.
He has also served as acting Chief Compliance Officer at Sylvan Road Capital, where he built the compliance program across the investment platform and advised senior management on the requirements of registering as an investment adviser with the SEC. Earlier roles include legal and compliance positions at State Street Bank and Trust, Numeric Investors and Capital Growth Management, where he began his career while attending law school in the evenings.
Gagnon holds a Juris Doctor from the Massachusetts School of Law and a B.A. in philosophy and political science from the Catholic University of America. He is a member of the Massachusetts bar and holds the DACFP Certificate in Blockchain and Digital Assets.
"Legal advice is more useful when you understand how the business actually runs, so I spend as much time with the operations and trading teams as I do with the documents," Gagnon said. "Digital assets reward that approach. How the custody rule applies to crypto, what a fund needs in order to hold it, how a trade actually settles: those answers have to be worked out with the people doing the work, not handed down afterward. That's the work I want to be doing, and it's why this role appealed to me."
Robert Gagnon
Press Inquiries
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