Steven Hopkins is a Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He is also currently serving as the Acting Chief Financial Officer for the USPTO.
As Acting Chief Financial Officer of the USPTO, Mr. Hopkins oversees an annual budget exceeding $4 billion and serves as the principal advisor to the USPTO Director and Deputy Director in supporting and improving the accounting, budgeting, planning, and organizational performance systems of the USPTO.
Mr. Hopkins has extensive experience with small- and medium-sized technology companies. He served as General Counsel and COO of Medici Ventures, a corporate venture fund focused exclusively on blockchain applications, and as President of tZERO, the world’s first SEC compliant securities exchange to run on blockchain. Prior to his involvement with Medici Ventures, Mr. Hopkins served as General Counsel of MasterControl, a regtech unicorn and President of Beckstrand & Associates, a real estate development and property management firm. He has worked as a law clerk for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (Judge W. Eugene Davis), as an associate for the law firm Irell & Manella, and as in-house counsel at Baxter Healthcare / Edwards Lifesciences.
Mr. Hopkins is a graduate of The University of Chicago Law School and Graduate School of Business (Booth) where he graduated with a concentration in Accounting and served as Comment Editor for the Chicago Law Review.