Infrastructure or Category? BGA President Yasmina Kazitani on the future of Web3 Gaming

Introduction

A certain kind of leadership in Web3 gaming works through alliances rather than companies. This kind of leader convenes operators, governments, regulators, and infrastructure providers and treats stakeholders across all facets of the ecosystem as constituents. This is the kind of leader who refuses to ship a thesis before the market is ready to carry it. When the work lands, it reaches populations, not just a few gamers following their profile on X.

Yasmina Kazitani is one of those leaders. The Algeria–Lamina1 partnership that sits on her desk, announced April 2025 and co-signed by Algeria’s Ministry of Strategy and Knowledge, is a recent proof of it: a three-pillar arrangement of a publishing Space for local game creators with a grant programme behind it, a Web3 + AI fan platform built with the Algerian national football team running into the 2026 World Cup, and a blockchain-based e-learning curriculum reaching over two million students with explicit emphasis on women in STEM. ³ On the other side of the table sits Lamina1, the metaverse company co-founded by Neal Stephenson, the novelist who coined the term metaverse in Snow Crash in 1992.

That is one file. There are others: roundtables with the UK Parliament and the European Commission; acceleration programmes paid for by Avalanche, the French government, and the Napoli regional government; and two BGA reports she shipped within her first nine months in the chair. The pattern across all of them is the same — practitioner-led, on the record, transparently scoped. The read on Web3 gaming’s future they collectively produce runs sharper than what the trade press wrote when GDC 2026 became the first edition in years without a single blockchain gaming session on the floor. ⁹ The question this profile sets out to answer is the one she answers in her own frame: as the industry comes out of its second crash, is Web3 gaming a category that survives on its own, or is it the infrastructure that the existing games plug into? Kazitani has a verdict.

Yasmina Kazitani, President of the Blockchain Game Alliance

Kazitani became the first female President of the Blockchain Game Alliance in March 2025, joining Sebastien Borget at the top of the industry’s trade association. ¹ She is also the co-founder of Numidia Valley, the Algerian gaming hub behind the Lamina1 partnership; co-founder of the Women in Web3 Alliance; and lead author, with Olivia Lee, Casey Joly, and BGA Director of Global Development Flavien Defraire, of Marketing 4.0: Unveiling AI Secrets for Modern Brands, published in September 2024. ⁴

Twenty-plus years of marketing leadership across automotive, edtech, AI and Web3; the corporate operating background she brought into a six-year-old non-profit; and the institutional currency she has built into MENA and Africa, where the BGA’s 2025 State of the Industry report documents the regional growth shift she is building on. ¹

King Arthur’s Roundtable — A Leadership Metaphor

If there is a single image that organises Kazitani’s leadership philosophy, it is the medieval one she returns to repeatedly in conversation.

“I love the metaphor that I always keep talking about, which is the King Arthur’s roundtable. I’m sure it’s his wife who suggested it, not him. That’s another matter.”

The aside is funny. The argument is serious. What the round table represents, in her telling, is the structural absence of a head seat, and the consequent absence of an ego at the centre of the conversation.

“It was a roundtable for the reason of leadership. There is no position. We are all in, same goal. And I have no issue with you. If you joined the project because you need more money, someone else needed because of status, someone else for credibility — at least we are all clear around the table because that’s fine. But the transparency about it is the most important.”

The frame is not theoretical. It is operational. Every new BGA partner gets the same diagnostic question on day one: tell me, transparently and sincerely, what you are looking for. Because then we can plug you to the right things. It’s not just a waste of my time and your time and our team’s time. Vetted, the partner gets connections: to the ministers who decide ICT policy in their target market, to the infrastructure layer that fits their stack, to the acceleration programme that maps to their build phase. Unvetted, the partner gets nothing. In practice, the round table is a filter.

The contrast she sets up is gendered, and she is unapologetic about it:

“Women have this capability of having the real King Arthur round table versus the men. We are more happy to step aside from our egos, titles and wherever and open up the door and say — guys, OK, let’s come around the table. While a man is like — this is the square and I’m at the head of the square table and the rest of the people at the table are listening.”

The 22.7% female participation figure from the BGA’s 2025 State of the Industry report is the data point she returns to in panel rollouts and interviews. ¹ The Women in Web3 Alliance — narrowed, by her own description, to the members who stayed through the bear — extends the same operating philosophy across the wider sector. A parallel project in the same advocacy register is run from London by Lavinia Osbourne, founder of Women in Blockchain Talks, whose work on visibility and community-building overlaps with this work.

Ownership, Protection, Privacy: Why She Crossed Into Web3

Kazitani’s path into Web3 began with a quiet realisation that the algorithmic, statistical, data-driven marketing models she had spent fifteen years building in spreadsheets were already being replicated by infrastructure she did not own. However, her early reaction to blockchain was lukewarm; the crypto layer she found unconvincing.

“I was like, not seeing very clearly. I didn’t see the use of it or the value, let’s put it this way.”

What changed her position was the data layer itself. Decentralising her own data, rather than handing it over by default to what she calls the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), was a frame she could engage with. The consumer side of the same realisation came through her children. She had been playing Roblox with them in 2018 and 2019, before the platform’s public reckonings with predatory user behaviour.

“I already started kind of educating my kids around — if you don’t know them, don’t talk to them, you don’t share anything. Like a CIA agent, right? Which kind of was scary for kids from like six, seven. But ten years later, they’re like — shit, mom, you were right.”

The conviction that emerged from those early-career realisations is not framed by her as an embrace of decentralisation as ideology. It is a defensive posture about three specific things: ownership of the digital assets a user generates; protection of children from manipulation at scale; privacy of the behavioural data that the major platforms have, by default, been monetising for over a decade. AI is the tool that makes the manipulation industrial. Blockchain is the trust and veracity layer that makes the tool’s output non-manipulative.

Before the BGA: The Football-Club NFT That Came Too Early

The first company she set up before the BGA was a 3D-NFT studio.

“Everybody was having NFTs like Manchester City and so on, we started creating an NFT, 3D NFT for Benfica Football Club to kind of put into a game. And I think we were too early for them. The idea was fantastic. They loved it. We started having calls from Valencia, from, you know, even the hockey teams in Canada. And I think that we were too early for that.”

The clubs’ enthusiasm did not change her read on the underlying execution risk. The interoperability that the 3D avatar would have required to do what it was promised to do, across clubs and across games, was not in production anywhere. She killed the project rather than ship something the technology could not yet support.

“I’m not the person who would kind of take your money and say, oh, let’s do it. I was like, guys, I’d rather turn off this project and come back when the interoperability is there.”

The discipline is what the BGA’s later acceleration programmes are built on: practitioners build the programmes; programmes that cannot ship do not get built.

Turning Frustration into Prose

In September 2024, Kazitani and her three co-authors published Marketing 4.0: Unveiling AI Secrets for Modern Brands. The book frames great marketing as the fusion of the unicorn (visionary creativity) with the camel (adaptable resilience for harsh, fast-changing environments). Most of the book argues that AI and data are amplifiers, not replacements, for marketers who lead with emotional intelligence and audience empathy. ⁴

The motivation, in her own telling, was less elevated.

“I never wrote anything like it before, because, well, I wrote a lot of articles. But never really expressed how I see the job. People, when you tell them you’re in marketing, they only see influencers, social media. And then in the recent years, they’re like, oh, it’s AI, it’s AI, it’s AI and AI can do it. And I’m like — my freaking 20 years were not even with AIs. It is the CRM, right? You’re kind of thinking that this is marketing. Marketing is beyond. It’s the product. It’s understanding others — and not just dropping content.”

The frustration with the AI-as-replacement framing was the genuine catalyst. Some people, when they get frustrated, complain. Kazitani wrote a book. She is, by her own description, “a corporate lady. I know how things happen.”

A second frustration is now visibly accumulating. As she is “pitching a lot” to founders, infrastructure providers, and governments who hear her experience and ask for support, but treat her first as a woman and second as a CEO.

“I think I need to write all this anecdote in a not-judgmental way.

The second book is already forming.

Early Days as President of Blockchain Game Alliance

When Yasmina took the position, the mandate, as she describes it, was diversity. However, the role was execution: the kind of cleaning, in her phrasing, that happens “in a very subtle way.” The BGA, before her tenure, was a six-year-old non-profit with member studios and a clear function. What she brought, by her own account, was the corporate background.

The first visible shift was the publication cadence. The BGA started shipping reports. Substantive ones, with named contributors and primary research, not the “theory-based” white papers Kazitani says consultants produce.

“Guys, can we stop the bullshit, and can we get to reality? If I interview people, it’s the people who are building the shit, not the people who think about it in their room.”

The second shift was the regulatory work. BGA now drives roundtables with the UK Parliament and the European Commission. Kazitani sits in the room.

“If you don’t have the regulators or the government, you’re not doing anything.”

The third shift was the acceleration programmes, paid engagements that put BGA member-company expertise to work for governments and infrastructure providers. Programmes have run with Avalanche, the French government, and the Napoli regional government in Italy. Members get reach. Governments get practitioners. The alliance gets relevance and revenue.

The work she leads and the priorities at the BGA, in her words, are “practical, value-driven.”

“It’s not networking for the sake of networking. We’re building connections with people to build things of value, teaching people how to fish, all that good stuff. Otherwise, if it’s just like coming to an event, you shake hands, you’re like — hi, how are you? Yes, my name, your name, blah, blah, blah. And then it’s like, OK, we have no business to do. Then it’s a waste of your time and mine.”

Diagnosis: Web3 Gaming — Greed and Tokenomics

Asked where Web3 gaming actually stands at the bottom of the second crash, the cycle the Reckoning Report has spent its 100 pages mapping, Kazitani is the alliance leader who will say what the founders and operators in the report cannot.

She names the capital-allocation failure first.

“With respect to the VC investments and where the money went, the DD — due diligence — was not done. They had a lot of money and they wanted to spend. It takes ages to do due diligence, and on games it’s the most complicated because you have different infrastructure, different players, different gamification.”

The data scales with her account. Across the period the Reckoning Report documents, VC funding for Web3 gaming collapsed 94.6% from $5.4 billion in 2022 to $293 million in 2025, with cumulative inflow across 2021–2025 reaching $12 billion or more. ⁵

The token mechanic that became the cycle’s defining feature, in her telling, was downstream of the capital-flow problem rather than a property of the games it was attached to.

“The token started picking up because people needed something to engage. But again, we base this on the greed of the investors and traders. It’s not the game. This is greed. When you’re talking to gamers, it’s about the complexity of the game, the mechanism of the game, and why you like the story. It’s not about the token.”

The bear market she frames as a feature, not a bug.

“I believe it’s a good thing because the scammers, the grifters, whatever you want to call them, are out. It’s great that you want to build a game, but if it’s just for the money, out.”

As outlined in Era 3 of the Web3 Gaming Reckoning Report, in her language, ‘this is the first time the cycle’s selection function has worked properly. The grifters identified themselves by leaving.’

Plug In, Don’t Replace: Web3 as Web2 Infrastructure

In her view, Web3 gaming is not going into the consumer game category next. It is underneath it.

“What we are looking and what I want to build with the BGA is an infrastructure of blockchain features that can plug into the Web2 games. I can see GTA 7 coming out with stablecoins in it. In the next three, four years, maybe Robl

The architecture she is describing is precise. The blockchain layer becomes the asset, identity, and value rails that the existing Web2 games plug into. The legacy publishers do not have to rebuild their consumer surface. They have to integrate a payment and ownership backbone that already exists.

The architectural read stands on its own: the consumer surface of the franchises she names (Roblox, Fortnite, GTA) is, in her estimation, already converging on an integration window that the BGA is building infrastructure for.

The endpoint she names is structural.

“They will have an economy beyond the game itself, which means I can pay with my Fortnite tokens, stablecoins, whatever we want to call them, outside of the Starbucks.”

The implication she draws is macro-structural.

“So now we’re going from a government-led economy to a companies-led economy.”

If the consumer-side digital economy of the next decade runs on company-issued stablecoins integrated into Web2 game platforms (Roblox tokens, Fortnite tokens, GTA tokens), the unit of economic governance under which the user transacts shifts. The user’s wage is in fiat. The user spends, at the margin, is in a platform currency the platform issues, manages, and may or may not be interoperable with other platforms’ currencies. The State’s currency authority compresses; the company’s economic surface area expands.

Web3 gaming does not win the next era as a separate consumer category. It wins as the infrastructure that the existing category plugs into. The trade press’s declaration of blockchain gaming’s death at GDC 2026 was right about the category but wrong about the architecture.

The Lion King and Africa’s Web3 IP

In a recent address to forty-five African Union ministers, Kazitani opened with a question.

“Guys, who can tell me if the Lion King is really American? Because I don’t know that America owns lions. This is African. We have lions, right? The savannah, the landscape — it’s African, it’s not American. And still Disney took the IP, ran with it, and made a lot of money out of it. What do we get? Peanuts. Zero.”

The argument she builds from there is the one that organises the Numidia Valley initiative. The next IP-creation cycle, in her telling, will not come from a Western content industry that has, by her assessment, “dried up of ideas.” It will come from emerging markets that have, until now, supplied the source material and not the distribution layer. The function of Web3, in this thesis, is not crypto onboarding. It is cultural-IP sovereignty: the rails by which African, MENA, and Asian creators retain ownership of the stories they generate, before AI-driven content extraction normalises the loss.

The Numidia Valley + Lamina1 partnership, announced April 2025, is the operational expression of the thesis. Three pillars in her home country: a publishing Space on Lamina1 for local game creators with a dedicated grant programme; The Fennecs Space, a Web3 + AI fan platform built with the Algerian national football team running into the 2026 World Cup; and a blockchain-based e-learning curriculum reaching over two million students with explicit emphasis on women in STEM, designed to expand to other African nations. ³ Backed by Algeria’s Ministry of Strategy and Knowledge: institutional, not private.

“We adopted blockchain because of necessity, not because we liked the technology. People in emerging markets don’t see blockchain as liberation. They see it as survival. In places like Nigeria or Argentina, people turn to digital assets because their money devalues monthly. The West often mistakes this necessity for speculation.”

MENA’s share of blockchain-gaming activity rose from under 1% in 2021 to roughly 20% by 2025; Africa’s from 0.5% to 5.5% across the same window. ⁶ What Numidia Valley is being built to do is convert that demand-side growth into supply-side IP ownership, before the studios that traditionally extract from emerging-market source material can repeat the Lion King pattern on the next generation of stories.

Regulators, GAFA, and the Senator’s Instagram

Asked about regulatory progress, Kazitani’s first answer is structural.

“We need to stop talking about crypto. Crypto was a good PR but then — move on. Crypto doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s bad publicity now, because the technology behind it is completely different.”

The political problem upstream of any regulatory progress, in her view, is not crypto’s substance. It is crypto’s vocabulary. Regulators are still legislating against the noun while their constituents have been operating under non-blockchain digital-asset extraction for over a decade. The constituents are the regulators.

She has the example ready.

“I was talking to a House of Lords in France — the Sénat — and the head of commission. My question was: do you have Instagram? She’s like, yes. Do you have Facebook? Yes. I’ve had it for over 10 years. Well, all your data belongs to the GAFA. However you want to explain it to me, you’re a senator in the French government, they don’t give a shit. Some things happen, you get locked out, your pictures will belong to them. She was like — my goodness.”

Crypto vocabulary is not the obstacle. The constituency’s relationship to its own data is the obstacle. Kazitani is willing to walk a sitting senator through that relationship in conversational time and on the record.

The privacy-advocacy case running parallel to Kazitani’s institutional case is pervasive. In an interview with Alina Latinina of Winprivacy, similar themes around privacy expectations surface the same problem. And the regulatory-architecture case, from the multi-government advisory side, is run by Loretta Joseph, whose 25-year financial-markets background informs OECD and ministerial work covering similar ground as Yasminas “roundtables”.

Who Owns My Skins, and What Is My Account Worth?

It would be easy, reading the public record, to mistake Kazitani for someone whose interest in Web3 gaming is institutional. However, she’s been a Call of Duty Black Ops player since university, when, by her own description, she was “the only girl around the guys” in her North African home country, putting in the hours that earned the team-play credit her gender did not buy automatically.

“They don’t take you as a real game, but once you get the play, you start to play, they’re like — oh, shoot. You know how — of course, I know how to play. I know how to drive. I know when I open the boot of a car.”

Interest in Web3 gaming is, beneath the institutional layer, a personal one. In Fortnite with her kids, she’s spent money on player skins and gear. “I can’t remember the name, but I know that I paid like an $80 at that time. We also had weapons, the raffles and everything else.” When their account got hacked. Epic Games never restored it; never explained what had happened, and did nothing to help recover it. “They didn’t feel like we were US-based. So for them, it was just like, whatever.”

“If you really put a valuation on the time and the asset, it gets you to the $10,000. There is no reason for that.”

The $10,000 figure is an estimate. The principle behind it is the one that took her into Web3 in the first place: an economic instrument she invested time and money into, hosted on infrastructure she did not own, taken away by a counterparty whose only feedback channel was silence.

The conviction maps to Jeffrey Zirlin’s account-ban story from his World of Warcraft years — both built on personal economic loss before they were built on ideology. Ownership matters because the alternative has already been demonstrated.

What Next

The regulatory engagement currently underway continues in the same register as the BGA’s mission, builder-led and focused on practical outcomes that add value to the communities it serves. A roundtable approach to collaboration and engagement with her stakeholders.

Her next book? Perhaps, if she can figure out the “non-judgmental” frame.

As for Web3 gaming specifically, it may not be, nor need to become a category, but the Blockchain as an enabler is most certainly the future, the infrastructure for gaming, a plugin for the next era of the gaming industry as a whole.

About This Profile

This article is part of the Architects of the Future series by Blockleaders, featuring perspectives from the leaders shaping Web3 gaming’s next chapter. The direct quotes attributed to Yasmina Kazitani were provided to Blockleaders during a 2026-04-29 interview. The article supports Blockleaders’ ongoing focus Web3 gaming and the Web3 Gaming: The Great Reckoning report that anchors the series.

Read the full report: Web3 Gaming: The Great Reckoning, 2019 to 2026