On International Women's Day I want to highlight some women to whom I'm grateful in the Ethereum community; who have made, and are making significant contributions to both the space as a whole and my understanding of it. This is by no means an exhaustive list, I decided to limit myself to 10 people, somewhat arbitrarily, to ensure this post didn't take too long to pull together. I would love it if you, reading this can use this thread to add other women who I've missed that deserve some recognition. Anyway, my 10 picks - in the order I happened to think of them:
Pooja Ranjan
If you want to know what is currently going on in Ethereum development then Pooja should probably be your first source. If you only follow her sites listed below you will understand more than 99% of crypto users. Do be aware it isn't aimed at complete newbies, it's for people who already have a bit of familiarity with the chain and want to stay as up to date as possible without needing to spend 25 hours a day following the progress of different teams, EIPs, discussions etc. If you know a little about Ethereum already and want to have the best 'alpha' on what is coming, without any shilling/hype etc, there is probably no better follow.
Ethereum Cat Herders
Ethereum Cat Herders: https://www.ethereumcatherders.com/
Etherworld: https://www.etherworld.co/
Mary Maller
Dr Maller is a ZK researcher at the Ethereum Foundation; and not 'researcher' as in "I did my own research by watching someone shill their shitcoin on Youtube", but 'researcher' as in "constantly publishing in academic journals on cutting edge cryptographic topics". We are already starting to see the early excitement build up around ZKEVMs and other zero knowledge projects, the odds are that any you happen upon will be built on top of mathematics that Mary has contributed to.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gzHDMSYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Scalability Solutions from zk SNARKs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4UfD4Mp6EM
The Roaring Twenties: Recent Advances in Zero-Knowledge Proofs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZAOt6_fZ1k
Anett Rolikova
Self-described 'Ethereum Sunshine', Anett has contributed to a bunch of projects, probably the most useful to me personally being her 'curated crypto list', which serves as an unbeatable starting place for anyone getting started in their Ethereum journey. Someone linked me to this list about 4 years ago and it was fundamental in making the task of getting to grips with Ethereum manageable. If you're feeling overwhelmed at the challenge of comprehending what this whole space is about: you want to learn more but don't know where to start then the answer is here:
She has also been an events organizer for the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, written the NFT Standards Documentation and made a bunch of other contributions.
https://medium.com/ethereum-magicians/ethereum-l2-future-by-ethereum-magicians-cd62cefa0fe7
Why ERC721 sucks and we need a new NFT standard [ETHCC 5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPk46oT1nt8
Camila Russo
If you haven't heard of Cami Russo yet, then it is very likely that you will in the next year or so. She has written a book on the early days of Ethereum called 'The Infinite Machine' which is currently being made into a movie by Ridley Scott's studio... yea that Ridley Scott studios, who also produced Alien, Gladiator, Bladerunner and some of the other most popular movies of all time! The story is pretty fascinating, and when the movie comes out it should take Ethereum another big step towards wider recognition in the general public.
She also founded and runs one of the most trustworthy crypto news sources - The Defiant. It focuses on DeFi, with plenty of developer interviews, use and presentation of on-chain data, etc etc:
Anna Rose
Anna Rose is one of the main links between the highly academic world of Zero Knowledge research and the average, less technically specialized user. She is basically involved in Zero Knowledge everything...
Podcast: https://zeroknowledge.fm/episodes/
Conferences: https://www.zksummit.com/
Jobs board: https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/
If you are interested in this 'ZK' stuff that you have heard will be the next big thing, but don't have a PhD in Cryptography then you are potentially easy prey for the shills of countless projects, who will use buzzwords and bullshit to convince you to buy into things you don't fully understand. Anna's content will give you the knowledge to know your SNARKs from your STARKs, and your PLONK from your Plonky2, so you can have a better chance of picking the really promising projects from those that just have a big marketing budget or desperate bagholders.
- Zero Knowledge: Privacy and Transparency's Beautiful Co-existence [DevCon 5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wMoV8G2118
Frederika Ernst
Dr Ernst is a host of Epicentre, one of the most well researched and non-shilly crypto podcasts. Their guests are industry leading builders and thinkers, but the hosts always push back on any unsubstantiated claims and demand further explanation of anything that sounds unlikely or overly optimistic. They have always done their research and the questions asked demonstrate a level of understanding that makes it almost impossible for the listener to come away without learning from every episode. You should be a listener if you want a general crypto podcast that never seems like the guests are just being allowed to hype up their projects.
She is also the COO of Gnosis, the scaling solution formerly known as xDAI, that POAPs (Proof of Attendance Protocol) run on. POAPs are collectable badges that have become an integral part of the Ethereum ecosystem, if you watch a big event live (like The Merge) then you can usually get a POAP, if you participate in a DAO governance call then you can usually get a POAP, if you go to an Ethereum conference then you will probably end up with a walletful of POAPs! Gnosis is also home to plenty of other dApps, a nicely decentralized staking community and all the usual sort of things a sidechain would want.
- Gnosis Chain: Extending Ethereum [ETHCC 5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYVOE3P08eU
Jinglan Wang
Jinglan is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Optimism, currently the second biggest Ethereum L2, recently in the news for a partnership with Coinbase over the Optimism Stack, and pioneers in retroactive public goods funding, DAO governance, and a series of massive airdrops to L2 users/Gitcoin donors/DAO participants etc. Disclaimer, I'm a delegate to Optimism and a Citizen's House badgeholder, so I won't go on about how great the project is as I'm definitely a biased source.
She is also a founder and advisor to the Blockchain Education Network, one of the biggest outreach programs in crypto, helping schools, clubs etc around the world teach people about this new technology.
Taylor Monahan
If you were around in Ethereum before 'The DAO' or joined any time up to the first ICO mania then you are pretty likely to remember Taylor, even if you didn't know here name. She was one of the founders of the first easy to use Ethereum wallet (My Ether Wallet), before which we had to wait to sync the chain before making transactions (was that Parity, Myst, ?, I don't remember). This was an absolute game changer and allowed many more people to start accessing Ethereum... just in time for them to faced with a barrage of new 'Initial Coin Offerings', investments with varying degrees of legitimacy. As well as being partially responsible for enabling the chaos that ensued, Taylor also took it upon herself to try and call out scams and terrible investment 'opportunities' that newbies were falling for. If you look her up on Twitter you'll see that she still is still doing this, though now working for the ecosystem's current main wallet Metamask.
How to Avoid Crypto Scams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiYYQCs49VM
The Original Sin [DevCon 6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OnxjlA-RKA
Pulja Ohlhaver
Pulja has become well more know in the Ethereum community following the publication of the paper 'Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul', of which she is a co-author. This was what sparked the conversations around soul-bound tokens and their uses in the middle of last year, it also talks about the state and future of many aspects of the space that are key to governance, such as Sybil resistance, quadratic funding and social recovery wallets, all of which are becoming increasingly important in DAOs and Web 3.0 in general.
She is a big picture / long game thinker for what the crypto ecosystem could become, if we can navigate our way there without falling into corporate/governmental control on one side of the ridge or fraudsters and scams on the other. If you haven't read the paper yet then I highly recommend it, or at the very least listen to her explain it.
- Bottom up Building: Pathways towards a Decentralized Society [DevCon 6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JpBmA-8FVc
Like everyone else on this list, Pulja has a variety of other contributions, such as being the Strategy Counsel at FlashBots (the MEV research and development organization).
Simona Pop
Simona is a DAO governance and public good thought-leader and advocate; a key contributor to Gitcoin (the biggest public goods funding platform in the ecosystem) and the organizer of Schelling Point (probably the biggest 'regen' conference). She was also a co-founder of 'Bounties Network', a platform similar(ish) to 'Fiver' for Web3.0 where freelancers can be paid for doing everything from finding a bug in some code, translating documentation t another language or even planting a tree... she's one of the many people in Ethereum community working hard to realize a vision of a better future, by building it.
DAOs and Biomimicry [DevCon 6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0I5dkkpJ9o
So over to you I guess, who have I missed?
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