Dr Vanessa Villanueva Collao

Vanessa Villanueva Collao is a Senior Research Fellow in FinTech at UNSW Sydney. Her research sits at the intersection of corporate law and technology, focusing on securities regulation, decentralized finance (DeFi), governance, and regulatory design.

Her work examines how emerging financial infrastructures reshape corporate organization and market dynamics, with particular attention to the role of intermediaries in decentralized markets and the governance of digital assets. She develops the concept of “cryptogatekeepers” to explain how new actors perform key governance and assurance functions in DeFi, challenging traditional narratives of disintermediation. Vanessa’s research combines empirical methods to analyze how legal systems respond to technological change and to explore broader questions of corporate and financial law. Vanessa's scholarship has been published in and presented at prestigious venues, including the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, the NYCU Law Review, and the Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property.  

Before joining UNSW, she was an Academic Fellow at Bocconi University and a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI. She has taught law courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels in the US and Europe. 

Vanessa is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (JSD), the University of California at Berkeley (LL.M.), and the University of Genoa (Law Degree and MA in Economics). Publications on SSRN.