Back in 2018, this site published a list of 24 women in crypto and blockchain worth following, at a moment when the imbalance was hard to overstate — our own analytics that year showed a readership that was more than 90% male, and major conference lineups routinely featured fewer than a handful of female speakers among dozens. The argument for the list was simple: an industry rethinking money from scratch cannot afford to draw its ideas from one demographic, and the women already building in the space deserved more visibility than they were getting.
Revisiting that list years later turned out to be one of the more satisfying archive exercises we’ve done. A striking number of the people on it went on to run foundations, launch banks, found major venture funds and write definitive books about the industry. This updated page keeps the original names, refreshes what they’re known for, and notes where careers have moved on — because a “who to follow” list is only useful if it’s current.
The Builders and Protocol Leaders
Elizabeth Stark remains one of the most consequential names on the original list. As co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, she has spent years turning Bitcoin’s Lightning Network from an academic design into working payments infrastructure, after earlier stints teaching peer-to-peer technology at Stanford and Yale.
Aya Miyaguchi may be the biggest riser of the group. Listed in 2018 as a Kraken alum and advisor, she became Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation that same year and led it through the network’s transition to proof-of-stake. In February 2025 she moved into the role of the Foundation’s President, focusing on institutional relationships — making her one of the most senior figures in the entire industry.
Amber Baldet, then JPMorgan’s blockchain lead, left the bank to co-found Clovyr, a company focused on making decentralized technology usable for ordinary developers and businesses. Her perspective — enterprise-grade skepticism combined with genuine belief in the technology — remains rare and valuable.
Preethi Kasireddy, the blockchain engineer with a Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz pedigree, pursued her own ventures as planned and became one of the most respected independent educators in Web3 development, teaching thousands of engineers how smart contracts actually work.
Connie Gallippi still runs BitGive, the pioneering Bitcoin-native 501(c)(3) nonprofit she founded in 2013, proving that the charity use case she championed early was more than a talking point.
The Investors
Kathryn “Katie” Haun was a Stanford lecturer and Coinbase board member when the original list appeared. She went on to become a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and then, in 2022, founded Haun Ventures — one of the largest crypto-focused venture firms ever raised by a debut manager, and arguably the strongest single trajectory on this list.
Arianna Simpson, the early-stage investor who was “into crypto before it was cool,” is now a general partner at a16z crypto, backing some of the sector’s most prominent projects.
Linda Xie co-founded and ran Scalar Capital, one of the first crypto-native investment firms, and became known for altcoin explainers that remain reference reading. She has since wound the fund down and moved into advisory and angel investing.
Meltem Demirors, listed in 2018 at Digital Currency Group, spent years as Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, Europe’s largest digital asset investment firm, becoming one of the most quoted institutional voices in the industry.
Caitlin Long took her 22 years of Wall Street experience and did something none of us predicted: she founded Custodia Bank in Wyoming, a digital-asset bank whose long legal battle over Federal Reserve access became one of the defining regulatory fights in American crypto.
The Journalists and Chroniclers
Laura Shin left Forbes to go fully independent, and her Unchained podcast became one of the longest-running serious interview shows in crypto. Her 2022 book The Cryptopians — which included reporting that pointed to the identity of the 2016 DAO attacker — cemented her as the industry’s most consequential investigative journalist.
Lily Katz covered crypto and fintech for Bloomberg when the list was written; her byline went on to appear across major financial newsrooms.
Dr. Julie Albright, the USC digital sociologist, continued studying what connected technology does to human behavior, publishing and lecturing widely — a reminder that crypto’s most interesting questions aren’t all technical or financial.
Policy, Advocacy and Regulation
Perianne Boring built the Chamber of Digital Commerce — since renamed The Digital Chamber — into one of the most established blockchain trade associations in Washington, spending a decade lobbying for workable digital asset policy while teaching the subject at Georgetown.
Elizabeth McCauley, then with the Bitcoin Foundation and Coinsecure, continued working across Bitcoin advocacy and business development internationally.
Exchange, Enterprise and Community Figures
Catherine Coley made the leap from Ripple’s investor relations to become the first CEO of Binance.US in 2019, one of the highest-profile exchange roles ever held by anyone on this list, before stepping back from public-facing positions.
Carolyn Reckhow parlayed her ConsenSys operations role into senior positions across crypto infrastructure companies, carrying her “macro social worker for the internet” framing with her.
Cherie Aimée, who helped build ShipChain’s community into one of the largest of the ICO era, moved on to broader brand and community leadership work after the logistics project wound down.
Tiffany Hayden remains what she was in 2018: an independent, opinionated, occasionally contrarian voice on Bitcoin and payments — the kind of follow that keeps a timeline honest.
Tatiana Moroz continues to merge music and crypto as the Berklee-trained singer-songwriter behind Tatiana Coin, the first artist cryptocurrency, still performing at industry events.
The Cautionary Entries
An honest revisit has to note that not every project survived. Tricia Martinez’s Wala, a banking-alternative platform for underserved markets, ceased operations despite genuinely good intentions — an early lesson in how hard crypto-for-financial-inclusion is in practice. Several other ventures represented on the original list, from Dubtoken to C2Legacy to Symbiont, either wound down or faded, taking listed roles with them. Careers continued; the projects didn’t. That ratio — most people thriving, many projects dying — is the crypto industry in miniature, and it’s why we track people rather than tokens when we want to understand where the space is heading.
Why This List Aged Well
The uncomfortable statistics that motivated the original article have improved without being solved: women remain a clear minority among crypto holders, builders and conference speakers as of 2026, even as figures like Haun, Long, Miyaguchi and Shin occupy some of the industry’s most powerful seats. The lesson of this list isn’t that representation fixed itself. It’s that the people worth following in 2018 were identifiable precisely because they were doing substantive work while the hype swirled around them — and substantive work, unlike follower counts, compounds. If you’re building a crypto reading list today, that’s still the filter we’d recommend.