No Truly Trustless Ecosystem: Arikia Millikan on Web3 (#33)

Week 33 – Arikia Millikan, founder and chief executive of CTRL+X

As Web3 continues to redefine the architecture of the internet, finance, and governance, it brings with it the rare opportunity to rebuild systems from the ground up. But if we are to build better, fairer, more inclusive systems, we must actively spotlight, and support, women in leadership roles.

Historically underrepresented in both tech and finance, women leaders bring diverse perspectives, collaborative approaches, and often values-driven leadership that prioritizes long-term sustainability over short-term gain. In Web3, where decentralized decision-making, community building, and innovation are core tenets, this diversity of style is very welcome if not essential.

Leadership isn’t monolithic. While traditional models have often emphasized hierarchy, competition, and control, many women leaders bring alternative approaches: participatory, empathetic, consensus-driven, or mentorship-focused. These styles align naturally with the ethos of decentralization and trustless systems, offering a counterbalance to purely technocratic or profit-led strategies.

By highlighting women in Web3 leadership, founders, developers, policymakers, and community builders, we not only correct representation gaps but also signal to the next generation that there is no single path to power. Visibility shapes possibility. And in a space as fast-moving and foundational as Web3, ensuring a plurality of voices isn’t just ethical, it’s strategic.

And so we are going to bring you some of the most inspiring women in Web3 and explore how and why they think as they do.

Week 33: Arika Millikan wants to build Web3 differently

Arikia Millikan is the founder and chief executive of CTRL+X, a company still in its pre-seed phase, and she approaches leadership with a clear view of what she does not want to reproduce. Her perspective has been shaped not only by founding a business, but by years spent working across media and tech, managing hundreds of people, many of them women and many of them freelancers. That experience has given her a strong aversion to inherited corporate habits and a sharper sense of what effective leadership requires in an industry that still presents itself as open while remaining notably male-dominated.

Millikan’s argument is not that leadership needs softer language. It is that it needs a different operating system. In the structures she rejects, leadership is top-down, coercive and too often built on fear, emotional pressure and the assumption that authority must be imposed. Her own preference is for something more grounded and more demanding: clarity of direction combined with an honest recognition that the people working with her have goals, limits, boundaries and needs that do not disappear when they enter a company.

“In my own operations I’ve chosen to reject those modes: top-down leadership, militaristic ways of getting things done, ordering people around, fear tactics, emotional abuse as a conditioning tool.”

Millikan is not arguing against leadership. She is explicit that the leadership role carries responsibility for roadmap and direction. But she also makes the case that people do their best work when they are treated as agents rather than instruments. In her telling, good management begins with realism: understanding what collaborators actually want, how they want to grow, what they can sustain, and where their boundaries lie. It is a practical rather than sentimental view of human motivation.

That thinking is especially striking given her background in journalism and media management. Millikan has managed many journalists and describes them as deeply internally motivated, often to the point that they struggle inside institutions that do not act authentically. Her point is that some workers, particularly those trained to analyse power, respond badly to structures that disguise self-interest as mission. Trust cannot be demanded in those settings. It has to be earned.

“Good journalists can critically analyse the breakdown of power structures, and they find it very hard to operate if they don’t believe management is acting authentically in the best interest of the people and the mission.”

The same directness runs through her assessment of Web3 itself. The sector has often described itself as meritocratic, decentralised and resistant to the hierarchies of older industries. In her view, Web3 does not simply replicate traditional power dynamics, but neither has it escaped exclusion. It attracts people who are not being served by the status quo, which can create space for new entrants, including women.

It also attracts those with extreme views, and it has built a language and culture that can operate less as a gateway than as a barrier. Her diagnosis is blunt: like much of tech, Web3 remains overwhelmingly white and male.

Yet she does not dismiss the field. On the contrary, she sees real possibility in the technology, provided people are willing to build with democratic intent rather than merely claim democratic virtue. For Millikan, the promise of Web3 lies less in overthrowing existing power structures than in designing better systems from the outset.

“The potential of the technology leaves room for the possibility that better futures are possible, if people will them into existence.”

That emphasis on design is important because it shifts the discussion away from slogans and towards responsibility. Decentralisation alone does not create fairness. The choices people make about participation, access and governance do. Millikan’s language is plain enough on this point: better worlds will not appear automatically. They have to be built.

Her answer to the question of whether her authority has been challenged because she is a woman is perhaps the most concise and the most revealing. She regards such behaviour as both predictable and beneath serious engagement.

“I get sexually harassed, underestimated, excluded, and mansplained to all the time. I feel like Neo from The Matrix deflecting bullets. It’s a waste of time.”

There is a similar refusal of illusion in how she speaks about trust. Web3 often uses the language of trustlessness, but Millikan does not accept that any meaningful ecosystem can function without trust. What her experience as a woman has given her, she suggests, is not some abstract moral advantage, but a faster and more accurate reading of character. In practical terms, that translates into judgement: knowing who not to trust early, and building around people whose presence strengthens the organisation rather than corrodes it.

“I don’t believe there is any such thing as a truly trustless ecosystem.”

Millikan is equally impatient with the idea that women should approach Web3 as though it were forbiddingly technical terrain. Her answer to women considering the sector is brisk and characteristic. Much of what is difficult, she argues, is simply unfamiliarity. Web3 often feels inaccessible not because it is incomprehensible, but because it has its own language, assumptions and reference points.

“Much of the complexity of Web3 is not technical. It’s learning the jargon, the terms, the companies, the protocols. It’s like learning another language.”

That is a useful distinction. It separates genuine technical challenge from cultural opacity. In doing so, it also makes entry look more manageable. Learn the vocabulary, understand the terrain, and the field becomes less mythic and more navigable. Her answer is not designed to reassure gently. It is designed to strip away excuses.

Her movement between grassroots communities and more formal institutional or regulatory spaces appears to depend on networks, mentors and women’s institutions. Again, the emphasis is on relationships that have substance rather than display. The overlap of social circles, the presence or absence of resonance, and the guidance of more experienced figures all matter. So too does reciprocity. When asked what support systems helped her earlier in her career, Millikan points to people, many of them women, who recognised potential and acted on it. Advice, meals, recommendations and access were not abstractions. They were practical forms of sponsorship.

“A lot of people, many of them women, went out of their way to take me under their wing. They saw my potential and took the initiative to pay it forward from their positions of power.”

This is perhaps one of the clearest threads running through her answers. Leadership, for Millikan, is not only about building a company. It is also about refusing dead structures, widening access, and repeating for others the forms of support that made progress possible in the first place. That same logic extends into her view of artificial intelligence and governance. Asked whether more women should be leading conversations around AI ethics in Web3, her answer is absolute.

“Women should be involved in every major decision when it comes to AI. The literal fate of humanity is on the line and I’ve seen enough of what men alone are choosing to do.”

It is a provocative line, but it is consistent with the broader argument she makes throughout. Systems are shaped by those who design them, fund them and govern them. If women are absent from those rooms, the outcomes will reflect that absence.