Leading Differently: Female Voices Shaping Web3
Web3 arrived with grand promises. A new order, free of hierarchy, where decentralisation meant merit ruled. But the story hasn’t unfolded that neatly. Power often looks much as it did before, and women remain underrepresented in leadership. Those who make it through are not playing by the old rules. They are writing new ones as they go, proving that leadership in this space can look very different.
Four women stand out: Lisa Loud of Secret Network Foundation, Yevheniia Broshevan of Hacken, Alena Afanaseva of BeInCrypto, and Silvina Moschini of SheWorks! and Unicoin. Their routes to leadership vary, but each has carved a place on her own terms.
Chaos as the Constant
For Lisa Loud, the defining reality of Web3 is chaos. She doesn’t treat it as a nuisance to be overcome, but as the environment in which leadership either thrives or fails. “When volatility is the only constant, people can’t rely on routine, stability, or even a clear career path,” she says.
The only dependable factor is trust, the trust between leader and team, the trust that steadies when markets spin.
Loud has learned to build that trust quickly, and to defend her authority in ways that pre-empt the subtle doubts that often greet women in leadership. Establishing credibility early, she says, is essential. “It may not be fair, but it is effective.”
Leadership with Empathy
Yevheniia Broshevan’s perspective is different. A cybersecurity engineer by training, she now leads a cybersecurity company of 140 people across more than 20 nationalities. Her style is rooted in emotional intelligence.
“We tend to connect not only on a professional level, but personally too,” she says. “That makes a difference when it comes to trust. Clients are not just dealing with a company name, they’re dealing with me.”
Her reliance on intuition has guided both team-building and community-building. When she couldn’t find the right professional networks, she created them: ethical hacker sandboxes in Ukraine, later mirrored in longevity groups in Lisbon. “When you find like-minded people, it changes everything,” she reflects. For her, community is not an afterthought. It is the bedrock of resilience.
Bias and Barriers
Silvina Moschini tells her story without softening the edges. Fundraising made the divide clear. “When I was asking for money, I got advice. And when my husband was asking for advice, he got money.” That moment was no outlier. It was part of a pattern she saw repeatedly in rooms where she was often the only woman.
Rather than accept the system, Moschini built around it. Her ventures, from SheWorks! to Unicoin, are designed to give women direct access to opportunity and capital. “I want to be remembered as someone who opened doors for others,” she says. The emphasis is not on individual achievement but on building structures that endure, so others can walk through.
Building a Different Kind of Organisation
Alena Afanaseva took a more structural approach. When she launched BeInCrypto in 2018, she wanted a newsroom that was global in reach and decentralised in spirit. Today, it operates across 50 countries, publishes in 26 languages, and reaches millions of readers each month. Seventy per cent of its departments are led by women, and its board is nearly 80 per cent female.
She insists this was never about quotas. “Everything begins and ends with people,” she says. Hiring experienced HR professionals early gave BeInCrypto the cultural foundation to grow inclusively and sustainably. The diversity followed naturally.
For Afanaseva, data and results are her armour. By making performance the centre of every conversation, she has found less space for her authority to be questioned. Yet bias lingers. She recalls being introduced at an event where attendees assumed her husband must be the founder. The reminder was sharp: assumptions die hard, even in a sector that calls itself disruptive.
Looking Ahead
What unites these leaders most is their concern for what comes next. Blockchain is colliding with AI, and the frameworks being set today will shape society for decades. Broshevan warns that too many standards are designed around a single perspective, what she calls the “reference man.” Afanaseva echoes that, arguing that inclusivity must be designed into governance from the start. She calls it “the moral architecture of the future.”
Loud is sceptical of token gestures. A woman can hold a leadership title, she says, and still not be heard if the loudest voices dominate. Real influence is what matters.
Moschini, as ever, thinks in scale. “If you want to solve big problems, you need to think big,” she says. Her companies aim to reach millions, built as platforms rather than single products. In her eyes, inclusion is not about nudging the margins. It is about ambition.
Leadership in Web3 is still being defined. These women show it can be done differently: trust forged in volatility, empathy that crosses cultures, blunt recognition of bias, organisations built with inclusion at their core, and ambitions set at scale.
Their paths diverge, but their intent converges, to make sure the systems being built now do not simply replicate the old ones. If Web3 is to live up to its promise, it will depend not just on technology but on leadership of this kind.
