CoinDesk's inaugural Top 50 Women in Web3 & AI list, launched in June 2025, celebrates innovators who are reshaping technology and finance. But the real story isn't about women succeeding in isolation — it's about how their achievements demonstrate the power of unified innovation across gender lines.  It’s terrific to see these women being recognized for their considerable achievements.  Moving forward, we must acknowledge that both women and men can and should be on a single list.  

The selection process was rigorous: over 300 nominees evaluated by a diverse panel of judges, ultimately choosing 50 pioneers who embody the spirit of creation. These women aren't just participants in the tech revolution — they're leading it.

Leaders driving real impact

Consider Nkiru Uwaje, Co-Founder and COO of MANSA, who describes herself as a builder and advocate. Since launching MANSA in August 2024, her team has used stablecoins to enable instant funding for underserved African clients, raising $10 million including a $3 million pre-seed round led by Tether. 

The results speak volumes: $92 million in payments facilitated with $178 million in on-chain volume. Uwaje's work demonstrates how blockchain technology can democratize financial access while building sustainable businesses.

Yasmina Kazitani, Co-President of the Blockchain Game Alliance and co-founder of Numidia Valley Africa Future Club, exemplifies ecosystem building on a global scale. Her partnerships, including collaborations with Algeria's Ministry of Strategy and Lamina1, are positioning Africa as a rising force in Web3 gaming. Kazitani's approach transcends gender — she mentors developers across all demographics, understanding that diverse teams create stronger products.

Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder and President of Anthropic, represents principled leadership in AI development. After leaving OpenAI over safety concerns, she co-founded Anthropic and championed "Constitutional AI" methodologies, achieving a remarkable $61.5 billion valuation. Her commitment to "igniting a race to the top on safety" secured major partnerships with Amazon ($8 billion) and the U.K. government, demonstrating how values-driven innovation can unite industry and public sector interests around responsible development.

The convergence revolution

These leaders operate at the intersection of AI and blockchain — two technologies that complement each other perfectly. AI excels at pattern recognition and prediction; blockchain provides verification and immutable record-keeping. In fintech, AI-driven analytics predict market trends while blockchain ensures transparent transactions. In gaming, blockchain creates decentralized ecosystems while AI enhances user experiences.

This convergence and these women are reshaping industries. In medicine, AI diagnostics pair with blockchain-secured patient data. In finance, tokenized assets democratize investment opportunities. 

Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, leads the Blockchain4Her initiative while advocating for gender equity in global forums. Her work shows that supporting women strengthens entire ecosystems, not just female participation.

Beyond celebration to collaboration

Here's where the conversation gets crucial. While celebrating these achievements is vital, true progress requires moving beyond separate recognition toward unified innovation. The Proof of Talk 2025 event, which admirably hosted the list's announcement, missed an opportunity by not featuring these women in integrated panels alongside their male counterparts. This approach treats women's contributions as separate rather than essential to the whole.

The challenge isn't unique to tech events. Regulators often impose barriers that slow innovation, particularly in crypto and fintech. Academia struggles to keep pace with Web3 developments. The public sector can't match private sector agility. Yet creators persist, working to align all stakeholders toward common goals.

The path forward

The most successful innovations happen when individuals with diverse perspectives collaborate as equals. Men and women working together leverage different strengths, allowing technologies to thrive together: AI's probabilistic reasoning with blockchain's cryptographic certainty, technical innovation with regulatory wisdom and startup agility with institutional stability.

The women on this list understand this instinctively. Amodei's principled departure from OpenAI and subsequent creation of Anthropic shows how values-driven leadership can elevate entire industries. Uwaje's financial innovations and Kazitani's ecosystem building work alongside countless male innovators to create systems that empower everyone. As Proverbs 31:25-26 observes, "Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she smiles at the future" — these leaders embody that forward-looking confidence, building tomorrow's infrastructure with both technical excellence and moral clarity. Their success stories prove that inclusion isn't about quotas or separate tracks — it's about recognizing that diverse teams solve problems better.

Building the future together

To truly harness this potential, we need systemic changes. Events should feature mixed panels showcasing shared achievements. Investors should fund diverse teams not because it's politically correct, but because it's strategically smart. Regulators should engage multiple perspectives to create balanced frameworks. Academia should mentor all talent while updating curricula to reflect Web3 realities.

The Top 50 women aren't footnotes in tech history — they are co-authors of our digital future. Nkiru Uwaje's financial innovations, Yasmina Kazitani's ecosystem building and Daniela Amodei's principled AI leadership and countless others’ work alongside male innovators create systems that empower and inspire.

The strength lies not in celebrating women separately, but in recognizing their integral role in unified innovation. By building together — leveraging every perspective, skill set and insight — we create technology that truly serves everyone. That's not just good business; it's the only way forward in an increasingly complex world.

The future belongs to those who build it together.

- Julia Bonafede, president, Jobs Peak Advisors 

In the search for stable, scalable yield on-chain, real world assets (RWAs) have become a cornerstone of digital asset strategies. Tokenized treasuries and private credit brought off-chain yield on-chain, delivering much-needed stability and quickly emerging as one of the strongest-performing segments in crypto.

Top crypto categories by market cap

https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories#key-stats

However, much of this early RWA activity has simply mirrored traditional finance. The next stage of evolution demands more. Capital moves quickly, and investors expect more from their assets. They’re looking for returns that aren’t tied to cycles, access that doesn’t depend on intermediaries and assets that are composable across the DeFi ecosystem.

One emerging example is tokenized reinsurance, bringing some of the world’s largest and illiquid industries into the fund flows of DeFi.

Reinsurance is a form of structured finance that helps insurers manage large or unexpected losses. For most investors, it’s been inaccessible — held back by outdated infrastructure, opaque processes and high barriers to entry. Despite that, it’s a $784B+ global market that generates returns from both underwriting profits and investment income, with capital expected to grow to $2T over the next decade.

Let’s put it into perspective:

The opportunity is becoming accessible through new infrastructure built on-chain — rebuilding access to reinsurance from the ground up and opening the door to a broader class of investors. Pair a yield-bearing stablecoin like Ethena’s sUSDe with a tokenized pool of reinsurance risk, and you’ve got a structured product that earns underwriting yield in all markets, captures collateral yield in bull cycles and plugs into the rest of DeFi.

This shift is happening alongside a broader transformation in how capital moves in the market. Whereas legacy reinsurance markets rely on private deals and siloed systems, Web3 makes it easier to move capital faster, and with more transparency, so capital markets can flow more easily in and out of such positions depending on reinsurance performance. Composability opens the door to new integrations across DeFi, and together these features allow for a more accessible model.

The introduction of tokenized reinsurance signals how far RWAs have progressed. The focus is shifting from simply replicating traditional finance on-chain to establishing new, crypto-native forms of structured yield. More broadly, RWAs are beginning to unlock financial structures that would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement in traditional markets. For capital allocators, on-chain reinsurance offers broader access, greater transparency and potentially more resilient returns.

As structured finance continues to intersect with Web3 infrastructure, reinsurance offers a preview of where the next wave of RWA innovation is headed: real-world markets reimagined for speed, scale and open participation. The larger opportunity lies in connecting decentralized and traditional systems in a way that is scalable, transparent and durable.

-  Dan Roberts, co-founder and CEO, OnRe

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