By Jessica Darmoni
“Women often have a real fear of messing up, not a fear of the technology itself, but the dread of having egg on our face,” says Maggie Love, Founder of SheFi and the recent winner of the 2026 Women in Web 3 Award at the Women in Tech North America Awards. “The truth is, no one is looking at who failed. Taking the shot is a valuable skill.”
Maggie Love has experienced failures and successes throughout her career. Armed with a journalism degree from Northwestern University, a business minor, and a sharp mind for integrated marketing, she had climbed the ranks at IBM Watson to become Chief of Staff for their financial services department. She was handling data plays, risk management technologies, and anti-money laundering procedures. Yet, sitting in high-level meetings, she watched a powerful male executive talk passionately about an emerging technology called blockchain, while others seemed disinterested.
“I was intrigued,” says Love, who went to the Barnes & Noble in Times Square looking for answers. “This was 2016 and at the time, there were no textbooks, only a single book called The Blockchain Revolution and a handful of Reddit threads.”
Determined to break into this new frontier, Love began networking on LinkedIn. Through a friend of a friend, she landed a coffee meeting with a contact from ConsenSys, a premier blockchain technology company.
“We met at Swallow Cafe in Brooklyn and I completely faked my way through the conversation but everything changed when I walked into their offices,” Love says. “Everyone was young, fresh, and wore whatever they wanted. I felt so embarrassed by my corporate costume. But the vibe was warm, welcoming, and liberating. Everyone was genuinely happy to be there. I knew I had to work there.”
Love joined ConsenSys in August 2017 on the strategic initiatives team, later co-founding Web3CLOUD, a decentralized infrastructure company, alongside Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. She learned the tech industry through trial by fire, navigating a fast-paced environment where she routinely watched male entrepreneurs boast about having three failed startups as a badge of honor.
“I realized failure was viewed as an attribute for them,” Love notes. “It proved they risked something. It taught me a massive lesson about how men and women think differently.”
A Date with SheFi
As the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) boom began to take shape, Love noticed a troubling trend. She surveyed her female counterparts at ConsenSys and realized none of them were participating in the early DeFi protocols. While anyone was allowed to join, only the men were entering the crypto raffles and experimenting on-chain.
“I kept asking myself, how can we help women de-emotionalize their relationship with money? How can we get them to adopt democratized resources and explore these new financial tools?”
The SheFi idea was born in 2019 and she launched in the middle of the 2020 lockdowns. It began as a mission to get women onto a single Zoom call to talk about financial alternatives during an unstable time. However, Love knew that information isn’t the same as education. True education requires experimentation. She structured her cohorts to connect new, complex crypto concepts to familiar frameworks, guiding women directly into on-chain interactions.
Her first cohort, affectionately called “A Date with SheFi,” got women actively swapping tokens and staking assets. Today, SheFi educates over 33,000 women across 76 chapters in cities spanning New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, Thailand, and the Philippines. The organization has hosted eight large-scale summits with up to 600 attendees, featuring 99.9% women on stage showcasing what they are building.
MomGPT
When her data center company went under in 2023, Love faced a choice. She could look for a comfortable full-time corporate job or bet on herself and go all in on SheFi. She chose herself. Today, her mission has expanded from DeFi to encompass the massive wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Love firmly believes that both DeFi and AI are the ultimate tools for modern female agency.
“Everyone deserves the financial independence that only crypto can bring,” Love says. “True financial empowerment begins with understanding digital wallets and self-custody. Every woman should have a portion of money that is entirely hers, stored securely, and completely under her own control.”
Love also has advice for women who are “booked, busy, and constantly carrying a crushing mental load as the MomGPT” of their homes and workplaces.
“Delegate the grunt work to AI. What is a task that you don’t need to do? Give it to AI. Let an AI agent format your data, build a job board, or find a restaurant for happy hour. AI can give us our time back to spend with our kids, to travel, or to find the love of our life.”
Financial & Technological Sovereignty
Love’s journey from a journalism graduate to a global Web3 leader is proof that you do not need a traditional tech background to shape the future of technology. While Love learned by trial by fire, she heavily advocates for finding mentors. She attributes her success to a network of early supporters, from her husband, who acts as her informal advisor and ideation partner, to early corporate sponsors like Polygon, AAVE, Base, and Solana.
“I was really scared when I launched SheFi. I had no background to do this, but I bet on myself that I could figure it out. The joy has been entirely worth the scratches.”
Maggie Love proved that the tech world isn’t a locked room, it’s just hidden behind dense jargon and false barriers. Through SheFi, she is handing women the keys to their own financial and technological sovereignty, one wallet and one prompt at a time.