The Future of Crypto Investing: 10 Leaders to Know
By: Meltem Demirors
Tags: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Investing, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

This week, institutional finance meets crypto at the inaugural CoinDesk Consensus: Invest conference! As these communities come together, I’m excited to highlight some of the women who are leading the charge across the crypto investing ecosystem.

Everyone wants to talk about digital currencies these days — wherever you go, you can’t escape the crypto conversation. This list highlights some of the investors, technologists, and leaders who are leading the conversation about crypto, and their take on what they’re excited about heading into 2018, and what they’re seeing that concerns them. I’ve also included my own thoughts at the end, and look forward to hearing yours in the comments section!

Top row from left to right: Sarah Tavel, Linda Xie, Arianna Simpson, Suna Said | Middle row: Kelley Weaver, Ambre Soubiran, Maja Vujinovic, Meltem Demirors | Bottom row: Alice Lloyd George, Kyle O’Connor, Rachel Mayer

ALICE LLOYD GEORGE | Principal, RRE Ventures

Alice is a Principal at RRE Ventures in New York, where for the past four year she has helped developed the firm’s theses and spearhead investments into blockchain and crypto companies. As a firm, RRE has invested in companies including Chain, Abra, Paxos, Digital Currency Group, Ripple, Gem, Bitpay, 21 and Mediachain. Alice also invests in other emerging technologies from seed to Series A and B, including machine learning, robotics, and augmented reality. She runs a podcast called Flux (@thefluxpodcast) that focuses on frontier founders.

Going into 2018, Alice is excited to see another wave of professionalization and features hit crypto trading, as well as a whole new crop of developers working on decentralized applications. She is interested to see how decentralized exchanges and stablecoins might develop and hopes to see the emergence of more user-friendly custody solutions. She remains concerned about mining concentration, governance issues in bitcoin, and the risk of further forks.

AMBRE SOUBIRAN | Founder, Kaiko

Ambre is a French native with an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics. She’s spent the past 8 years in capital markets and equity derivatives in London, and recently left banking to run Kaiko, a company providing financial data in the digital currency space.



Ambre’s current role in the ecosystem is to provide digital assets financial data to investors and academia, covering all major exchanges and currency pairs.

Going into 2018, Ambre is excited about investment themes, products & services, tokens, regulations, etc. She’s also keen to see the space get more institutionalized and professionalized as brain drain from banks continues to accelerate, and new capital comes into the market. Ancillary businesses are growing and supporting the development of the ecosystem.

At the same time, her concerns for 2018 are primarily around institutional interest. Market structure isn’t really ready for large institutional capital inflow- there are no real risk management tools. Regulation is both a positive and a concern, and ICOs need to be more standardized. Bitcoin halving and ongoing forks are another concern.

ARIANNA SIMPSON | Founder and Managing Director, Autonomous Partners

Arianna has been an angel investor and venture capitalist for the past several years. In 2015, Arianna and her partner launched Crystal Towers Capital, an early-stage venture fund. Previously, she worked Facebook and BitGo in sales and product roles.

Arianna actively invests in the cryptocurrency space and has just launched her second fund, Autonomous Partners, which is focused on digital assets.

She’s particularly excited about developments in the privacy space. There are some incredible advances being made in the field of cryptography (Bulletproofs, zk-STARKS, etc) which will enable users to transact privately without sacrificing the trustlessness of bitcoin and other early digital assets.

On the flip side, she’s concerned about the number of new entrants to the space who are raising purely speculative, HFT-style funds without a strong base of knowledge from trading traditional markets, and without a deep understanding of digital assets. She worries when we will see major losses due both to bad trading and poor security practices.

KELLEY WEAVER | Founder and CEO, Melrose PR

Kelley Weaver is a young entrepreneur and founder of Melrose PR, a leading crypto and blockchain public relations and content marketing agency based in Los Angeles, California. Kelley routinely writes about blockchain for publications like Forbes and The Huffington Post. She is also launching a podcast — Crypto Token Talk in January 2018.

The crypto space is a new frontier. One of Kelley’s major concerns is that there isn’t a quick,easy, or centralized resource for people who want to learn more about bitcoin. The initial conversations with newcomers tend to be long, with a focus on the risks and security issues. Coinbase is probably the easiest on-ramp to the world of cryptocurrency at the moment, however, it has it’s limitations. There is lots of room for improvement in terms of the overall crypto user experience!

Her hope for 2018 is that the overall experience of transacting with cryptocurrency will become smoother, more intuitive, and an overall better user experience than traditional payment methods. Once the industry achieves a better interface experience through better infrastructure, we will all move down the road towards mainstream adoption. Kelley truly believes that one day we will all transact with cryptocurrency.

KYLE O’CONNOR | Strategic Planning, NASDAQ

Kyle works on the Global Trading & Market Services team at Nasdaq in New York City. She is currently researching the ins and outs of the cryptocurrency space and providing strategic guidance to the business unit teams at Nasdaq.

2017 has been such an exciting year, it will be hard to top! For Kyle, the most exciting trends moving into 2018 are broader adoption and education of cryptocurrencies globally. She’s happy to see friends and family outside of the finance and technology communities are intrigued as opposed to skeptical, and want to learn about not only cryptocurrency but also how blockchain can affect so many aspects of our lives in a positive way.

Going into 2018, she’s concerned about custody solutions. The industry has grown by leaps and bounds within the last few months, but we still have a long way to go as an ecosystem to develop easy and inexpensive ways to store and protect our investments.

LINDA XIE | Co-founder and Managing Director, Scalar Capital

Linda Xie is co-founder and managing director of Scalar Capital. Previously she was a product manager at Coinbase. She is also an advisor to 0x.

She’s currently focused on long term investing in the crypto space and helping out promising projects.

Linda is excited about privacy coins and decentralized exchange as well as seeing more institutional investors and custodians coming into the space.

She’s concerned about projects raising unnecessary amounts of money in token sales.

MAJA VUJINOVIC | Chief Innovation Officer of Emerging Tech & Future of Work, GE Digital

Maja is the Chief Innovation Officer of Emerging Tech & Future of Work at GE Digital. In her early 20’s, Maja started her career as an entrepreneur in mobile payments in Sub Saharan Africa. She plays an active role in involving and empowering more women and young girls to undertake roles in technology and executive positions.

In her current work, Maja is using digital currencies to run pilots for GE around smart factory and smart machine use cases, including using a bitcoin wallet to test smart contracts for machines. She also personally invests in digital currencies.

A few things are exciting for Maja going into 2018. She’s eager to see new consensus models emerging as currently, bitcoin mining is affecting our climate and simply not necessary. Proof of Pact and to see how this will develop and proof of stake. She’s also excited to see how off grid solution and blockchain actually marry in some successful pilots and provide electricity to those that are in need- this space only needs time, as the smart minds are already in the space. The speed of innovation in this ecosystem is unprecedented, but Maja is most excited to see execution and utility.

Her primary concern is the constant political wars happening within the bitcoin community, which may impact bitcoin’s ability to scale for broader usage.

RACHEL MAYER | Founder, Trigger Finance and Product Lead, Circle

Rachel is a Venezuelan native and a Mathematics MIT grad with a passion for finance and technology, entrepreneurship and building great financial products. She worked at Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan through the crisis as an algorithmic trader and emerging markets expert. While at JPMorgan she led the etrading efforts for emerging market currencies, breaking records for billions of traded volume each day in client volume. She co-founded Trigger in 2015, and grew it organically to serve tens of thousands of retail investors. The company was acquired by Circle where she is now a product lead, working to bring new mobile products for individual retail investors.

In 2018, Rachel is excited for crypto to be cemented as a real asset class for institutional and retail investors. 2017 was clearly a pivotal inflection point for cryptocurrencies and digital assets, laying the foundation and trust for a new wave of investors. She’s eager to see new products and tradable instruments, and for the wealth management industry to start looking to put some dollars to work!

What makes her nervous is the string of fraudulent ICOs giving a bad reputation to a still fragile ecosystem. She is hoping to see less of these such that the regulatory pendulum does not swing too far to the left and innovation suffers as a result.

SARAH TAVEL | General Partner, Benchmark

Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark. Sarah invests in consumer, software as a service, and in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners, where she led Greylock’s investment in two (unannounced) companies. Before Greylock, Sarah was the product lead for search, recommendations, computer vision, and pin quality at Pinterest.

Sarah invests in Series A and B equity financings, and tokens. As a firm, Benchmark invested in Xapo, Bitstamp, Pantera, and one unannounced investment which she led.

Sarah is excited to see a calming down in the ecosystem, which she hopes will lead to more clarity (and level-heads). She’s also hoping to see a dapp emerge that gives us another glimpse into the future.

She’s concerned about any fallout that might result from ICO craze that we’ve experienced the last ~6 months.

SUNA SAID | Founder, Nima Capital

Suna runs Nima Capital, a family office which invests in all asset classes, across geographies, industries and stages. She currently spends most of her time on the blockchain vertical, and serves on Fidelity’s Blockchain advisory board. She also founded the Suna Said Foundation which is committed to supporting girls worldwide through Blockchain technology applications.

Suna is investing in all areas of Blockchain technology — digital currencies, funds, venture, and ICOs. Once she invests, she’s also helping her companies grow and scale internationally.

Heading into 2018, Suna is excited about a few key trends, including custodianship, institutional buy-in, banking disruption and leapfrogging of applications, as well as digital currencies helping emerging market populations. She’s also a massive fan of anything Joseph Poon is working on. Her belief is that humanity can truly evolve through blockchain technology

One of Suna’s key concerns is that established structures will not be able to adapt to the rapid systemic change introduced by digital currencies and blockchain technology.

MELTEM DEMIRORS | Director, Digital Currency Group

I’m the Director of Development at Digital Currency Group, a firm that not only invests in digital currencies but actively supports the development of ecosystems around these new blockchain-based assets by leveraging our network. I personally invest in digital currencies and tokens and enjoy wrapping my mind around new ways to conceptualize and assign value.

In 2018, I am excited to see the emergence of a more competitive mining landscape. One of the biggest threats to digital currencies is centralization, and keeping networking infrastructure decentralized and truly distributed is an important aspect of bringing financial freedom and privacy from principle into practice. I’m skeptical of stablecoins, but interested to see a few new projects launching and hope I’m proven wrong.

I’m concerned to see how little progress the crypto ecosystem has made on distributing capital. We have a massive 1% problem in every crypto asset class, and no strategy to distribute crypto more broadly beyond initial investors. Maybe ICOs are part of the process of re-distributing wealth? If we want crypto to be truly global and distributed, we’ll need effective mechanisms to distribute wealth and power among network participants.