Agustin M. Barbara

Overview

Agustin M. Barbara is the founder and managing attorney of A.M. Barbara, P.A. His practice is limited to digital assets: cryptocurrency fraud and recovery, blockchain investigations, federal forfeiture and remission, exchange and custody disputes, digital-asset litigation, and blockchain intellectual property.

He is admitted to The Florida Bar and to multiple United States District Courts.

Federal matters and novel procedure

Agustin has represented victims and other parties in federal cryptocurrency matters involving fraud, stolen digital assets, anonymous defendants, blockchain tracing, exchange-held assets, and government seizure.

His work includes Bandyopadhyay v. Defendant 1, also known as Suxia Obei, also known as Sasha, and John Does 1-20, a federal cryptocurrency-fraud case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that produced the first default judgment entered in a United States federal court following service of process by NFT. The case addressed a central challenge in digital-asset litigation: how to pursue anonymous foreign defendants whose identities may be concealed even when their blockchain activity can be traced.

The court authorized service of process under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(f)(3) through NFT transfers sent directly to identified cryptocurrency wallets. In approving the procedure, the court considered a declaration from Agustin describing the proposed blockchain-based service mechanism, together with forensic tracing connecting the stolen assets to specific wallets and exchange accounts. The case ultimately resulted in a $957,281.50 federal judgment.

Agustin went on to obtain NFT-service authority in further matters in the same district, including Bowen v. Li and Sun v. Defendant 1. In Sun, involving the theft of more than $5 million in cryptocurrency, the court authorized service on a defendant located in the People’s Republic of China, again on a declaration from Agustin describing the service mechanism.

The Bandyopadhyay service order has since been cited by federal courts addressing alternative service on anonymous and foreign defendants.

The United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York cited Bandyopadhyay in Meghji v. Wallet Owner (In re Celsius Network LLC), 666 B.R. 28 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. 2024), a published opinion authorizing NFT service across three adversary proceedings, in which the court observed that it had found no decisions holding that NFT service fails to comport with due process. The order has also been cited by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana in Chow v. Defendant 1.

In June 2025 the United States filed a civil forfeiture complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against more than $225.3 million in cryptocurrency traced to investment-confidence fraud, in what the Department of Justice described as the largest cryptocurrency seizure in United States Secret Service history. More than 400 suspected victims were identified.

Agustin represents 118 individual claimants in that proceeding and seeks the return of more than $70 million in reported losses, traced through the same network of accounts identified in the government’s complaint.

Working with blockchain evidence

Tracing is where these matters are decided. A blockchain records every on-chain transaction and proves very little on its own. The distance between those two facts is where digital-asset claims are usually won or lost.

The work is organized around closing that distance. Cross-chain movement, transaction reconstruction, wallet and address analysis, exchange and service-provider identification, open-source intelligence and the analysis of laundering and obfuscation patterns are all means to a single end: establishing what the record actually shows, and where it stops.

Agustin works directly with the firm’s Director of Blockchain Investigations, a former senior official of an Argentine cybercrime prosecution unit, to separate verified attribution from analytical inference and to state plainly which is which. That distinction is what makes a trace usable by a court, a prosecutor or a claims administrator, rather than only by the person who produced it.

Intellectual property and technology

Agustin is also a registered patent attorney, admitted to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

He prosecutes trademark and other intellectual-property applications for blockchain technology businesses, including the group behind mempool.space, the open-source Bitcoin blockchain and fee-market explorer, whose marks cover cryptocurrency research and analytical publications.

Background

Agustin previously served as a managing partner of The Crypto Lawyers, where he handled cryptocurrency fraud, asset tracing, exchange disputes and federal forfeiture matters.

Before entering legal practice, Agustin worked as a research associate in biomedical engineering, the field he specialized in for his B.S. at Florida International University. He earned his M.B.A., summa cum laude, from FIU’s Chapman Graduate School of Business and his J.D. from Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law.

His work in the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics at FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, on relaxin-family peptides and their receptors, contributed to peer-reviewed publications in Biology of Reproduction and Molecular Endocrinology.

Selected Public Record

Service by NFT was the featured topic of Westlaw Today’s Weekly Update of August 16, 2023, reporting the order in Sun v. Defendant 1.

The Bandyopadhyay service order and resulting judgment were analyzed by DLA Piper, Hunton and Ropes & Gray.

Rajah & Tann and the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and the Law discussed Bowen v. Li alongside the English High Court’s rulings in D’Aloia v. Persons Unknown and Jones v. Persons Unknown.

The judgment in Bandyopadhyay was reported by Law360, Decrypt and TheStreet, among others. Coverage of the Florida rulings was syndicated in English, Spanish, French, Russian and Vietnamese.

Agustin has been sought out for comment on digital-asset fraud, liability and regulation. Cointelegraph quoted him on service of process against unidentified defendants, The Art Newspaper on state taxation of digital assets, Top Class Actions on consumer liability in cryptocurrency, and WITN on investment-platform fraud.

Selected Speaking Engagements

NFT.NYC, “Legal Frameworks for Investigating NFT Thefts,” New York, April 2024.

NFT.NYC, “NFT Law Simply Explained,” New York, April 2023.

The Blockchain Event at ITEXPO, “NFT Commercialization Rights and Restrictions,” Fort Lauderdale, February 2023.

Web3 Summit, Women Web3 Miami, “What Is a Smart Contract?” Miami, December 2022.

Nova Southeastern University, Shepard Broad College of Law, “Emerging Legal Issues in Cryptocurrency,” Davie, Florida, November 2022.

NFT.London, “NFTs and Regulation: IP, Property Rights, and Policies,” London, November 2022. Video.

DCENTRAL Miami, “NFT IP and Licensing,” Miami, November 2022. Video.

NFT.NYC, “NFTs and Intellectual Property: Exploring the Legal Landscape and Key Issues,” New York, June 2022. Video.

DCENTRAL Austin, “NFT Law: Are NFTs Legal?” Austin, June 2022. Video.

iLaw2022, The Florida Bar International Law Section Global Forum, “Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: Novel Issues in Commercial Litigation,” Miami, April 2022.

Descriptions of matters refer to representation and, where noted, to procedural rulings. A docket or representation does not establish a result, and prior matters do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future matter.