Aimy Qisteena

Aimy Qisteena holds legal qualifications in both Malaysia and the United Kingdom. She is a non-practising Advocate and Solicitor of the High Court of Malaya and a Barrister-at-Law of Inner Temple, United Kingdom. Her LLB in Law and Sociology is from Cardiff University.

Aimy joined LegalBison nearly two years ago. Before that, she spent two years at a litigation law firm handling legal drafting, legal research, compliance and regulatory research, and client advisory.

She has attended the Kuala Lumpur Bar’s Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Law Talk and a talk by the Securities Commission Malaysia. LegalBison’s account of the Kuala Lumpur Bar event is published on its blog. Aimy speaks English and Malay.

Aimy’s regulatory expertise is licensing perimeter analysis for digital asset business models. In a written legal opinion, she determines whether a wallet, exchange, token, or hybrid platform falls within a licensing regime. Each model is tested against the local framework and FATF standards.

The business models she reviews most often are centralized exchanges, custodial wallet providers, stablecoin issuers, fiat on/off-ramps, hybrid platforms and online gambling platforms. The same model can sit inside a licensing regime in one jurisdiction and outside it in another. Every opinion is therefore written for the specific client and jurisdiction. Her working knowledge of AML/CTF requirements supports the compliance framework matters she handles.

Her analysis has covered offshore, LATAM, and North American environments, including VASP determinations in Costa Rica, BVI, Canada, and Panama, within LegalBison’s 50+ jurisdiction scope. Anonymized opinions include whether a wallet provider could operate in BVI, whether a gambling platform’s activity is permissible in Costa Rica, and how a client could carry out crypto-related activities in Panama. She has also reviewed a CIMA license file for Toobit.

As Lead Legal Counsel, Aimy leads the legal team in LegalBison’s Malaysia office. The team drafts the firm’s in-house legal documents and maintains its legal database, and formal legal opinions come from this legal vertical, separate from the day-to-day guidance that client-facing specialists provide.

The in-house documents are the ones a client needs to operate: terms of service, privacy policies, AML/CFT policies and risk assessment documents, each prepared for the client’s entity, jurisdiction and model. Bitget and CoinW received these for their Anjouan entities. Her team has also prepared documentation sets for clients across Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Georgia and Panama, and she has advised a crypto exchange on company structuring.

Her most complex project at the firm was the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction legal database. Built with LegalBison’s IT team as a custom internal system, it turns legal and operational requirements into one verified reference for the legal team and the client-facing teams. Day-to-day, Aimy also handles legal and regulatory research, template creation and process documentation, and works with other departments so the legal position reaches each client’s point of contact intact.