Practitioners from the highest levels of the industry built into one firm
Where exchange compliance, federal investigations, and industry training meet.
Outrider rides ahead
of the system
An outrider rides ahead of the main body to read the terrain, understand the conditions, and signal what is coming so that the people behind can move with confidence. That is Outrider's work.
Outrider was built by three practitioners who saw the same gap from different angles. One from federal financial intelligence. One from the compliance programs that defined the industry. One who built the training infrastructure the space runs on. The firm was founded to close that gap by the people who had spent their careers inside it.
The leadership team
Don Spies
Founder and CEODon founded Outrider after more than two decades across intelligence, financial crime, and digital asset investigations. He served at the Department of the Treasury, where he developed deep expertise in illicit finance, sanctions, and digital asset risk. A decorated combat veteran, he moved to the private sector to lead blockchain investigations that have recovered and protected tens of millions of dollars on behalf of clients, including a single matter in which his work helped identify and protect 38 million dollars in concealed assets. He founded Outrider to give organizations the expertise they need to operate confidently in the digital asset economy.
Steve Christie
head of complianceSteve is among the most experienced compliance executives in the digital asset industry. He served as Global Chief Compliance Officer at Kraken and as Interim Global Chief Compliance Officer at Binance, two of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Across decades in financial services spanning both traditional finance and digital assets, he has built, restructured, and defended compliance programs in front of the Department of Justice, FinCEN, OFAC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. At Outrider he advises financial institutions, virtual asset service providers, and other regulated entities on AML, CFT, regulatory strategy, and compliance program design.
Rakesh Kashyap
head of instituteRakesh leads the Outrider Institute, the firm's professional training platform. He previously architected and led the digital asset industry's first scalable training and certification ecosystem, establishing the benchmark for how investigators, compliance teams, and regulators develop expertise in blockchain analytics and financial crime. Across a career spanning more than 20 years, he has designed and scaled professional training systems and certification programs across multiple industries.
Five principles
we work by
Practitioner Led
By the time we walk into your matter, we have already run the programs, led the investigations, and trained the people now operating the field, which means the discipline is something we built rather than something we are still learning. You are not paying for our learning curve.
Plain Language
The work is already complicated, and the job we take on is to translate it for whichever audience has to act on it next, whether that is a board, a regulator, a judge, or the investigator in the room next door. We protect the substance and let go of the jargon, because losing the audience is the same as losing the matter.
Tool Agnostic
We have no software license to defend and no platform to sell, so the only motivation we bring to an engagement is the outcome you need from it. We choose the right tool for each matter on the merits of the matter rather than on the economics of a vendor relationship.
Compounding Expertise
What we learn inside one engagement strengthens the next and feeds back into the broader ecosystem we operate in. Investigations sharpen the compliance decisions we make for clients later, compliance engagements surface where training is missing, and the graduates of the Institute carry that expertise back into the industry it came from.
Accountable to the Work
Our name goes on the report, the program, and the certification, and we stand behind each of them in public. We testify when called, defend the work when it is challenged, and stay current as the field continues to move beneath all of us.
Talk to the team
We will tell you what we can do, what we
cannot, and what we would recommend for your situation.