Recently, while reading cryptocurrency news, I noticed an interesting phenomenon—women entrepreneurs in this industry are indeed gaining more influence. It's not that superficial "diversity for diversity's sake" narrative, but real decision-making, capital control, and infrastructure building.

I’ve compiled five women entrepreneurs to watch in 2026. Their commonality isn’t the same field; rather, each has achieved tangible results in different tracks.

Meltem Demirors has been active in this space since 2015. She served as Chief Strategy Officer at a well-known asset management firm, earning considerable industry reputation, and later founded Crucible, focusing on building long-term infrastructure for the open digital economy. This kind of work doesn’t often hit trending searches, but it compounds growth over time. She has also lectured at Oxford and MIT, and this background is reflected in her communication style—rarely discussing prices, more about architecture.

Ekaterina Tarasova has over 13 years of experience in communications, making her a rare veteran in the Web3 PR circle. Her PR firm IdolMe holds a core view: narrative shapes markets; project failures are often not technical issues but poor storytelling. Since its founding, her agency has achieved over 10 billion in campaign coverage, directly engaging with over 500 journalists across 40 global markets. She frequently speaks at major Web3 conferences and writes columns—exposure most PR founders are reluctant to pursue. Her strength lies in strategic understanding combined with execution ability.

Nancy Jones gained professional experience in fintech and global financial institutions before entering crypto media. She co-founded CryptoNewsLive, one of the most ambitious editorial operations in the field, competing directly with top industry media in the YMYL category—one of Google’s most scrutinized categories. Her background in technology, marketing, and product sets her apart from most media founders, treating editorial work as a product problem to solve. Her behind-the-scenes work on strategy, content infrastructure, and audience growth is key to keeping the publication alive through market cycles.

The CEO of a well-known exchange, Gracy Chen, has also been very impressive in recent years. She has vigorously promoted accessibility and education—markets that many large platforms have neglected for years—and the results prove this direction was right. The exchange now serves hundreds of millions of users across dozens of countries. She also launched funding and mentorship programs for women entrepreneurs in Web3—these are not just PR but projects with tangible outcomes. She exemplifies a unique type of operator: expanding rapidly while maintaining focus on what truly matters to users.

Elizabeth Stark, co-founder of Lightning Labs, is dedicated to solving Bitcoin’s scalability issues that have existed since the beginning. The Lightning Network enables near-instant, low-cost Bitcoin payments without touching the base layer. This technological ambition has been ongoing for nearly a decade. She has taught Internet technology and society at Stanford and Yale, and contributed to Coin Center, promoting the refinement of crypto policies. Few possess such deep technical expertise combined with policy credibility.

What connects these five women isn’t a shared industry background but that each has experienced at least one full market cycle, some even multiple. This long-term persistence in crypto news and industry observation is actually much rarer than it appears.