THE TOP 50 MOST INFLUENTIAL FEMALES IN CRYPTO

- 2023 Edition -


The Badge

In 2022 Cointelegraph found out that the number of female crypto users grew by 160% on the majority of top crypto exchanges. To celebrate the massive surge of women into the cryptocurrency space, we wanted to recognize some of the fearless women who are leading the way. Our list consists of CEO's, Founders, Reporters, Chair Women and more. Stand with us in celebrating these amazing women for their incredible contributions to the space.


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Meltem Demirors
1

Meltem Demirors is the Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, a financial services firm in London and New York that focuses on alternative assets, starting with digital currencies. Demoirors also hosts a weekly podcast and the annual Crypto Springs conference in Palm Springs.

Elizabeth Stark
2

Elizabeth Stark is a blockchain entrepreneur, educator and open-internet advocate. Elizabeth is the cofounder and CEO of Lightning Labs, a network client that scales and speeds up the Bitcoin network. she is a fellow at Coin Center, the leading digital currency policy organization, and an advisor at Chia, a company building a new, easy-to-use blockchain protocol.

Cathie Wood
3

Catherine Wood is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer at ARK Invest. Ark focuses solely on disruptive innovation and offers investment solutions to investors seeking long-term growth in the public markets. As Chief Investment Officer “CIO” and Portfolio Manager, Cathie led the development of ARK’s philosophy and investment approach and has been a long time advocate of Bitcoin and blockchain based innovation.

Caitlin Long
4

Caitlin Long is the chairman of WyoHackathon, a celebratory blockchain event for developers, entrepreneurs and established companies. Long has been an advocate of blockchain and bitcoin since 2012. Prior to WyoHackathon, she was the co-founder of Wyoming Blockchain Coalition.

Blythe Masters
5

Blythe Masters is the former CEO of Digital Asset Holding, a financial technology firm developing distributed ledger technology for wholesale financial services. Masters is the first and most notable Wall Street banker to go to the blockchain sector. Blythe is also Chairman of the Governing Board of the Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Project, member of the International Advisory Board of Santander Group, and Advisory Board Member of the US Chamber of Digital Commerce.

Galia Benartzi
6

Galia Benartzi is a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the Bancor Protocol, a standard for the creation of Smart Tokens, cryptocurrencies with built-in convertibility directly through their smart contracts. She is also the CEO, Founder at Particle Code- a cross-platform that automates the porting process for software developers.

Joyce Kim
7

Joyce Kim is the co-Founder and Executive Director of Stellar.org. Previously, Joyce was a VC at Freestyle Capital. She also cofounded simplehoney, a mobile commerce startup, and was CEO of Soompi. She is currently a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab.

Laura Shin
8

Laura Shin is a crypto and blockchain journalist. She is best known as one of the first mainstream reporters to cover digital currencies and is a former Senior Editor for Forbes. Laura also worked as a reporter for Newsweek, a technical writer for the Wall Street Journal and a producer at The New York Times. Currently, Shin is the producer and host of the podcasts "Unchained" and "Unconfirmed," and is writing a book about cryptocurrencies.

Kathleen Breitman
9

Kathleen Breitman, co-Founder of Tezos, a blockchain-based smart contract platform with an on-chain governance mechanism to coordinate and push upgrades to its network.She has also worked at Accenture, Bridgewater Associates and the Wall Street Journal.

Kelly Loeffler
10

Kelly Loeffler is an American businesswoman and politician serving as the junior United States Senator for Georgia since 2020. Kelly entered the crypto industry when she became CEO of Bakkt, after her 15 year-long career at Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)’s digital asset platform Bakkt, she led her company to be the first to offer CFTC-approved ‘physical’ Bitcoin futures.

Jinglan Wang
11

Jinglan Wang is the Co-Founder & CEO of Optimism PBC- Building the Optimistic Ethereum Network and the Optimistic Virtual Machine to scale Ethereum. She started her journey into crypto at the MIT Bitcoin Club and since then has been a blockchain product manager at Nasdaq and co-founded the trade financing startup Eximchain.

Catherine Coley
12

Catherine Coley is the CEO of Binance.US, a digital asset marketplace licensed from the cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. Coley was Head of XRP Institutional Liquidity at Ripple. Pre-crypto, Coley served as a foreign exchange and treasury management advisor after five years on trading floors as a foreign exchange associate at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong and London.

Vansa Chatikavanij
13

Vansa Chatikavanij is the CEO & Founder of OmiseGO, a second layer scaling solution for Ethereum. Prior to OmiseGO, Vansa led dynamic teams of engineers, economists and social scientists in a range of organizations from The World Bank to Sky Visual Imaging Venture. Vansa is also an adviser for the blockchain project, Hoard Exchange.

Christine Lagarde
14

As the head of the ECB and given her fairly positive stance toward cryptocurrencies, it is likely that there will be more efforts to construct a clear regulatory framework for crypto assets in the coming months.

Aya Miyaguchi
15

Aya Miyaguchi is the Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation, the company that promotes and supports the Ethereum platform. Miyaguchi is also an advisor to Kraken, a crypto exchange.

Sally Eaves
16

Sally Eaves combines a depth of experience as a Chief Technology Officer, Practicing Professor of FinTech, Founder and Global Strategic Advisor, consulting on the application of disruptive technologies for both business and societal benefits. She is an international keynote speaker and respected online influencer across multiple channels and consistently rated in the top 10 for blockchain and social media influence worldwide.

Preethi Kasireddy
17

Preethi Kasireddyis the founder and CEO at TruStory, which is a social network that enables productive debate and was previously a software engineer at Coinbase. Prior to TruStory and Coinbase, Kasireddyis was Investment Banking Analyst at Goldman Sachs, a year later, she joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Partner.

Linda Xie
18

Linda Xie is the former product manager of cryptocurrency exchange giant, Coinbase. Linda has raised a $20 million fund that is investing in blockchain companies in exchange for tokens, with a focus on privacy technology. She's now invested in 18 projects and employs a team of four analysts.

Arianna Simpson
19

Arianna Simpson is the Managing Director of ASP, which is a cryptocurrency hedge and venture capital fund focused on investing in cryptocurrencies, digital assets, and blockchain-based companies. Prior to ASP Simpson was previously a Product Manager at BitGo.

Amber Baldet
20

Amber Baldet is the co-founder of Clovyr - a decentralized network which aim to offer a complete ecosystem of blockchain applications and services. Amber was named as one of the people leading the blockchain revolution by New York Times. Prior to Clovyr she was a blockchain program lead at JP Morgan.

Dovey Wan
21

Dovey Wan is the founding partner at Primitive Ventures, a venture capital firm, with a focus on blockchain and related technologies, executive director at Hardcore fund, a non-profit that funds Bitcoin developers as well as acting as an advisor to Coindesk.

Katie Haun
22

Kathryn Haun is a general partner at Andreessen Horrowitz's crypto division, that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future of finance. Prior to Andreessen Horrowitz, Haun spent a decade as a federal prosecutor focusing on fraud, cyber, and corporate crime alongside agencies including the SEC and the FBI.

Perianne Boring
23

Perianne Boring is the founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a trade association aiming to promote the use of digital assets and blockchain technology. She is a former congressional staff member and the former author of Forbes’ The Boring Bitcoin Report.

Tess Rinearson
24

Tess Rinearson is on the engineering team at Chain, where she builds blockchain software. Tess has worked on storage and protocol problems. Previously, Tess was a full-stack engineer at Medium and was responsible for the social graph service, which was Medium’s first service written in Go.

Michelle Phan
25

Michelle Phan is an American makeup artist, entrepreneur, and voice actress who became notable as a YouTuber. Phan, who turned online beauty tutorials into a $50 million business, learned about Bitcoin while researching gold in 2011. She invested in Lolli, an ecommerce startup that rewards shoppers with Bitcoin for online purchases.

Alena Vranova
26

Alena Vranova is the co-Founder and former CEO of SatoshiLabs, a firm dedicated to developing cryptocurrency hardware wallets and other related software. Alena led the design of the TREZOR hardware wallet. She is also the author of The Little Bitcoin Book.

Rachel Wolfson
27

Rachel Wolfson is a journalist, public speaker, and podcast host. She has over 10 years of experience writing about technology and has been covering the blockchain and cryptocurrency space since 2017. Rachel is currently writing a book on enterprise blockchain.

Tiffany Hayden
28

Tiffany Hayden is an expert on Ripple's XRP protocol and full-time blogger and is an independent adviser, that helps professionals and organizations in the finance industry understand Blockchain technology. Hayden is also the community manager for Edge.

Ella Zhang
29

Ella Zhang is vice president at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers China and Head of Binance Labs. Ella has rich experience in the TMT industry, especially in the e-commerce and advertising sectors. Ella was formerly Google's key account manager responsible for Google’s top advertising clients, including Taobao, 360Buy, Amazon China, Dangdang.

Lily Liu
30

Lily Liu is the co-founder and CFO at Earn.com as well as a former partner at Multi Family Cffice and CFO at Chinaco Healthcare Corporation. Lily is an investor and advisor, with a background as a CFO and operating executive in the US and China.

Christina Lomazzo
31

Christina Lomazzo leads blockchain projects efforts at UNICEF overseeing blockchain and cryptocurrency initiatives. Before joining UNICEF, she has worked with various levels of government in Canada who were using blockchain. Christina also wrote her master’s thesis on how global banks were responding to blockchain.

Connie Gallippi
32

Connie Gallippi founded BitGive in 2013, the first government-recognised Bitcoin non-profit and a pioneer organisation, leveraging Bitcoin and Blockchain technology via practical applications for humanitarian work in the developing world. Connie Gallippi has worked with non-profit organizations for over 14 years.

Elizabeth McCauley
33

Elizabeth McCauley handles Global Business Development for Coinsecure. She also serves on the Boards of the Bitcoin Foundation and Code to Inspire. McCauley previously worked for BitPay, as a freelance writer for Bitcoin Magazine, and as a US Member of Congress.

Simone Maini
34

Simone Maini is Chief Executive Officer at Elliptic, operationalizing Elliptic's vision to enables customers to efficiently manage crypoasset risk, grow business, and meet regulatory obligations. She is part of the invitation-only WEF Digital Currency Governance Consortium following Elliptic’s recognition as a 2020 WEF Technology Pioneer.

Elizabeth Rossiello
35

Elizabeth Rossiello. Chief Executive Officer and Founder, AZA. A rare female founder in Fintech who is also part of a very small group of growth-stage businesses that are truly pan-African. Rossiello's three past roles include Africa Investment Associate, Capital Markets & Advisory Center at Grameen Foundation.

Rhian Lewis
36

Rhian Lewis is a software engineer and co-developer of altcoin portfolio tracker, CountMyCrypto. She is also the co-host of London Bitcoin Women, which she founded with a friend in 2014. She has a BSc in Economics from UCL and is a former digital journalist at thetimes.co.uk.

Jen Greyson
37

Jen Greyson is the founder of the Blockchain Sisterhood, and CEO/Founder of CO.CO – the “Airbnb” of office space, Jen proposes that women are the answer to crypto adoption. Prior to joining the cryptocurrency/blockchain community, Jen managed a multi-million dollar life insurance company.

Maxine Ryan
38

Maxine Ryan is the Founder at PRSPR, formerly ProsperApp. PRSPR is on a mission to improve millions of millennials financial security one quote at a time. Maxine was awarded Forbes 30 under 30 in FinTech and has spoken at over 200 international events.

Sandra Ro
39

Sandra Ro is CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, where she serves the GBBC and blockchain community to foster education and build bridges across enterprises, governments, and start-ups to help fulfill the potential of blockchain technology to solve real world problems and help society.

Noelle Acheson
40

Noelle Acheson is Director of Research at CoinDesk, and author of the Crypto Long & Short newsletter. Noelle writes and speaks about the impact of blockchain technology, and develops new media products at CoinDesk, the leading media resource for the blockchain and cryptocurrency sectors. She holds bitcoin and a small amount of ether.

Alakanani Itireleng
41

Ani Itireleng is the founder and CEO at Satoshi Centre, a community owned Bitcoin startup incubator focused on mentorships, training, coding camps and teaching initiatives around Bitcoin and second layer technologies. Satoshi Centre is was Africa's first blockchain-based fundraising platform, and is fueling Ani's dream to bring decentralization to Botswana.

Mihriban Ersin Tekmen
42

Mihriban Ersin is the COO of Colendi, a blockchain fintech startup helping to create better financial inclusion opportunities for the un/underbanked, and empower the developing world. After graduating from Istanbul University, Mihriban started her career as a project manager for the European Union and European Commission.

Tonya M. Evans
43

Tonya M. Evans has expertise in the areas of intellectual property, new technologies (including blockchain and distributed ledger technology), entrepreneurship and innovation (including advisor to startups), entertainment law, trusts and estates, and municipal finance.

Tina Bhatnagar
44

Tina leads the operational teams at Coinbase and is focused on scaling the support and IT teams to manage customer demand. Prior to Coinbase, Tina was VP of Operations and User Services at Twitter. Prior to Twitter, Tina spent eight years at IBM helping companies build and scale their operations.

Carolyn Reckhow
45

Carolyn Reckhow is the Head of Business Development and Strategy at Thesis and Keep Project. The crypto industry veteran was formerly at Casa where she served as head of operations and client services. During her tenure at Casa, Reckhow helped launch the company's two consumer-facing crypto products – Keymaster and Node.

Manju Mohan
46

Manju Mohan is the CEO & Co-Founder at Ionixx Technologies Inc - a design-centric, custom software development firm specializing in mobile, web and blockchain technologies. Mohan leads the company's cross functional teams located in USA, India, Singapore & Canada.

Fahima Anwar
47

Fahima Anwar a Blockchain enthusiast and Senior Director, Global Marketing & Communications at Dubtokens. Fahima is a marketing and branding expert and a content strategist with 10 + years in marketing, e-commerce & emerging technology. She specializes in digital and influencer marketing.

Erica Kang
48

Erica Kang is the Founder and CEO at KryptoSeoul, a community building team focused on building communities in Asia. She is also a partner at Blockwater Capital, advisor of the Korea Blockchain Association, and Youtube host of KryptoSeoul channel.

Caterina Ferrara
49

Caterina Ferrara is the Founder & Community Manager at Blockchain Ladies, a virtual place where strong women inspire other strong women. She is also the Chairperson at Neuralia – Global Research Connections, the first Blockchain-based crowdsourcing project that allows citizen-scientists to collaborate about Science research topics. Caterina was formerly the Community Manager at PHI Token.

Angel Rich
50

Angel Rich is the founder and CEO of the Wealth Factory, a fintech company that designs educational technology games to provide equal access to financial literacy across the world. She has won numerous business competitions and has been featured by Forbes. In 2012, Angel was recognized with a Presidential Achievement Award.