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Female CEOs, Founders & Leads in the Blockchain Industry

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:52 PM
Justin OConnell
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:52 PM

Mainstream media has highlighted the supposed gender divide in Bitcoin and the wider blockchain industry. However, it’s very participants have experienced different. Women have played an important role in the evolution of blockchain, of course. And, a just few can be seen below.

CEO of BitPesa, Elizabeth Rossiello

Rossiello has worked in Kenya since 2009. Speaker of five languages, this mother of two leads payments in an area she recognized needed help. Oft ignored by traditional financial institutions, Rossiello has led the way for fintech to help the developing world. She is currently based out of Nairobi.

Trezor CEO, Alex Vranova

Ms. Vranova heads the leading Bitcoin wallet hardware team. TREZOR represents one of the most storied Bitcoin hardware wallets in the industry and recent updates make it also one of the most user friendly. Ms Vranova leads a team of expert designers and programmers dedicated to ensuring your bitcoins are kept safe.

CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, Blythe Masters

This former JPMorganChase executive is an economist and blockchain expert. She founded Digital Asset Holdings, which is a startup providing settlement and ledger services for both digital and mainstream assets.

She first began working for JPMorgan Chase in 1991 after numerous internships there. She oversaw credit derivative products and became the young woman to achieve managing director status in the firm’s history at the age of 28.  She also oversaw the commodities department at JP Morgan. She once asked Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary, to become a Bitcoiner. The Warburg Pincus veteran declined.

BlockCypher CEO, Catheryne Nicholson

Based in the Bay Area, Nicholson is an engineer, entrepreneur, mother and former U.S. Naval Officer who has built large-scale software platforms in education, energy and emissions management, CRM, and defense systems for companies like MommaZoo, C3, Siebel Systems and Northrop-Grumman. The US Naval Academy and Stanford University graduate is working on cool blockchain projects now.

BlockCypher has built a cloud-optimized block chain technology layer, so developers and large enterprises could build, monitor and secure blockchain applications at-scale. Blockchain agnostic, BlockCypher runs multiple block chains, including their own.

President  XAPO, Cindy McAdam

Cindy McAdam had a lot of experience in high business before entering into the blockchain industry, such as having negotiated the sell of Postini to Google for $643 million. She also worked as COO and General Counsel of mobile payments companies Bling Nation and lemon Wallet.

She now oversees Switzerland-based Xapo, a provider of bitcoin wallet with cold storage and a bitcoin-based debit card.

CEO Third Key Solutions, LLC., Pamela Morgan

Morgan considers herself a global citizen interested in social justice, individual privacy and institutional accountability. She quit a full time job in early 2014 to work in the Bitcoin industry.

Her primary interest these days is in law and technology, especially blockchain and bitcoin technology. Along with well known Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos, the former attorney works on Third Key Solutions, LLC., which explores how blockchain tech can streamline legal processes.

CEO of Follow The Coin, Tina Hui

Hui, founder of one of the largest Bitcoin advocacy sites, Follow The Coin, is also a journalist and PR partner/advisor in the blockchain space. A serial entrepreneur, Hui works in freelance marketing, business development and strategy consultancy for more than ten years.

Armed with a Bachelor of Science from The University of San Francisco, Tina has worked for numerous companies like Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Independent, Fox Atomic

Skye Elijah, co-founder and CEO of CoinBeyond

Elijah’s CoinBeyond seeks to do what so many believe is the key to the future of Bitcoin: making it easy to use. She plans to do this with a bitcoin debit card. The company also offers ecommerce and point of sale products, and a Bitcoin wallet.

“CoinBeyond provides a future-ready payment platform for Point-of-Sale and eCommerce,”  the company states on their website. “They make cutting-edge payment technology adoption simple for busy merchants so they can accept more ways to pay and provide their customers a modern multi-channel checkout experience.”

Ceo of CoinTelegraph, Toni Lane Casserly

As CEO of CoinTelegraph , Casserly has turned the website into one of the Bitcoin advocacy stalwarts.

Apart from her role at CoinTelegraph, Casserly advises several companies, including ChangeTip, and she’s organized Eikon: The Bitcoin Music Festival.

“For the first time in our lives, we are actually able to define the way we think about politics, about logic, about money, about value,” she told CoinCafe. “I saw this as a model for the next stage of the world, one that promotes both peace and a broader sense of equality. In doing so, I believe we can begin to create a more humanitarian planet that focuses on the success of the individual, while also building strong communities and cultures around Bitcoin or alternative systems of logic that can be controlled by people who are adding value, not by people who are using the system to manipulate others. With inventions like this, these inventions of abundance, the idea of world peace is not actually a dream but a very possible reality.”

ChooseCase CEO, Melanie Shapiro, PhD

Based in New York City, Case Wallet Inc  claims to have  built the world’s easiest and most secure bitcoin wallet. A biometrically secure, GSM-enabled and multi-sig HD architecture, that works in 60+ countries, has buy/sell and send/receive functionality, and fits in a wallet.

 Alakanani Itireleng, Botswana’s First Bitcoiner

Botswana’s first Bitcoiner and Bitcoin Botswana Community Group founder. On a mission to bring Bitcoin awareness and usage in Botswana. Alakanani Itireleng, 36, believes in the future of Bitcoin. “I love the prospect and the possibility that Bitcoin might bring to laypeople like me,” Itireleng told Motherboard.

Botswana’s Bitcoin Ambassador  thinks she might be the nation’s first Bitcoiner.

“If people see a change in your life, they will ask how you do it,” she told Motherboard. “Of course, when I answer Bitcoin, everyone will want to know more. So I guess seeing is believing for a lot of people.”

Co-Founder of Casheer, Tiffany Hayden

Tiffany Hayden is a co-founder of Casheer , Inc., which is a free mobile payment processing platform for merchants and consumers. Tiffany is a member of Bitcoin GNO – an online community for women involved in Bitcoin and is running as the Libertarian Candidate for Governor of Michigan in 2018.

She is considered one of the top 250 blockchain influencers on Twitter, and was ranked by CoinFilter as a top 40  woman in Bitcoin. She is passionate about financial tools which allow consumers independence, in particularly the refugee population.

Founder and President of Chamber of Digital Commerce, Perianne Boring

Perianne Boring Bitcoin

Founder and President of the Chamber of Digital Commerce , the first D.C. based trade association dedicated to promoting digital currency and digital assets to public-policy makers. She is also the author of the “Boring Bitcoin Report“, a popular industry blog. She has appeared on Max Keiser and even met with Fed Chairman Janet Yellen.

Lead Designer at HashRabbit, Melissa Volkmann

 

Lead Designer at HashRabbit , founded in March of 2014 with the sole intention of making it easy for anyone to participate in the hashing network. The opportunities around Blockchain applications are still in the infancy stages, but the underlying hashing infrastructure is what will allow them to see their full potential. At HashRabbit, we have developed a platform that focuses on improving that very infrastructure which is fast, secure, and easy to use. This platform allows operations of all sizes to connect to each other in a transparent manner, further expanding the distributed hashing network and allowing blockchains to scale.

Maria Sparagis,  President DirectPayNet

Maria is the President of DirectPayNet , a private payment services firm that specializes in international and domestic merchant accounts for ecommerce merchants mainly in the medium to high risk arenas. She first refers to herself as a “payments guru.” 

Images from LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and Shutterstock.