Rebuilding the Matriarchy: Funding Female Founders is a panel discussion that brings together leading voices in the web3 ecosystem to explore the challenges and opportunities for women in the industry. The panel will be moderated by Valerie Song, co-founder of F3, an organization that connects female founders with female investors in the web3 ecosystem. Joining her on the panel are Sydney Lai of Magic Labs and Cynthia Huang of DTravel.

The panel will delve into the current funding state for female-led ventures in web3 and the systemic barriers preventing women from accessing capital. The discussion will also explore innovative solutions and strategies for increasing the participation and representation of women in the industry, including using blockchain technology to create new financial instruments and utilities for liberation. The panel will also discuss the importance of creating a culture of equity, empowerment, care, trust, inclusion, growth, and responsibility in the web3 ecosystem.

This panel is not just about discussing the problem but also about sharing the stories and the strategies of the panelists and the organization they lead, who are actively working towards solving this problem and creating a more inclusive and equitable future in web3. Join us as we hear from these leading voices in the industry and learn about their groundbreaking work to break down barriers and support female founders in the web3 ecosystem.

Lauren Luz (Product Lead, Giveth)

Product Lead & GIV economy Steward at Giveth. Passionate about using web3 tools to create regenerative systems around creating public goods.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” Buckminster Fuller

The world today is driven by capitalism. There is exceptional innovation in the private goods sector because the creation of scarce goods and services is controlled by market feedback.

Without the opportunity to use market feedback, public goods lack effective coordination and funding mechanisms. The sector is dominated mainly by governments (funded by taxes) and nonprofits (funded by donations).

DAOs provide an opportunity to build new systems where public goods can be created from the “bottom-up” with end-user input and cooperative community engagement, and abundant, non-excludable value can be created with a global impact.

Impact DAOs benefit from decentralized governance, regenerative funding mechanisms, and a diverse stakeholder group and have the potential to change the world for the better.

Kelvin Fichter (Benevolent Chaos Monkey and The Optimism Collective), Kames Geraghty (District Labs), Masha Healy
(Co-Founder / Grants Lead, and Impact Cards / Celo Foundation), Evin McMullen (CEO & Co-Founder Disco.xyz )

We used to live in a world where the only input to an individual’s reputation and identity was their word. After all, “A man is only as good as his word.”

Now we face the opposite problem: too many inputs from too many unverified sources. It’s less about your word and whatever words an algorithm places on top of a search field.

At its core, Web3 can take promises made with words and verify them with actions, putting your wallet address where your mouth is. But how should this information be visualized? How do we unify a user’s identity, protect their privacy, and verify sources contributing to this identity? How do we take work out of silos and collaborate? What does reputation look like in this new ecosystem?

Disco is creating data backpacks for off-chain credentials. Optimism has started widely adopting on-chain NFT quests, and impact cards are measuring impact on and off-chain, and so on. As more projects try to represent the multifaceted actions and build the Web3 persona, let’s ask some tough questions about what this should look like, existing projects philosophies on web3 identity, and, more importantly, where should this information live on-chain, off-chain, and both?

EthDenver attendees are the stewards of identity and reputation now and what it will look like in the future. The ideas shared in this panel will spread into the work that builders are doing and become a point of consideration for users. How will this project contribute to building the Web3 persona, how do you want to be represented in Web3, and do you agree with this approach? An individual chooses their words and their actions, but it’s up to us to find a way for them to relay this to the broader Web3 ecosystem accurately. “