Wisdom From The Women Leading The Blockchain Revolution With Irina Berkon of Metallicus
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Educate yourself and stick to what you know, even if it’s not the most popular opinion.
As a part of our series about Wisdom From The Women Leading The Blockchain Revolution, had the pleasure of interviewing Irina Berkon.
Irina Berkon is the CFO and board director at digital assets technology leader Metallicus Inc, as well as co-founder and director of First Blockchain Bank and Trust Holdings. Her leadership has been instrumental in helping Metallicus deliver on its vision to bridge the gap between crypto and traditional financial services and prepare the industry for a secure, compliant, radical future. Irina also serves as a Managing Director of Golden Seeds, an angel investor network with a mission to fund women-led companies and accelerate opportunities for women disrupting their industries.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share with us the story of how you decided to pursue this career path? What lessons can others learn from your story?
I was born in a small town in Russia’s Ural mountains that offered little opportunity, especially for women. I immigrated to the U.S. and came to San Francisco without my parents when I was just fourteen years old. I did well at school and I was fortunate to have a mentor who advised me to go into accounting, which I quickly learned that I not only loved but excelled at. From there, I got a job at a well-known professional firm, giving me a huge amount of exposure with both public and private companies. Then, I pivoted to take on the world of fintech. I managed the IPO of a major marketing technology company, and had several exciting tech opportunities that led me to my leadership role at Metallicus. So much of my career and life have meant taking leaps into the unknown — and sometimes you have to do that — but if you develop a strong set of values, experience and relationships, it makes trailblazing just a little easier .
Can you tell me about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
Crypto still has a lot of barriers — it’s hard to use and often exposes people to nasty surprises. At Metallicus we are changing all that because we believe digital assets and the amazing technologies and products you can build with them should be for everyone — not just sophisticated techies and high-earners but your friends, family, people without bank accounts, migrant workers, entire populations in countries lacking in financial infrastructure. We’ve built Metal Pay, Proton Loan and other products to create the simplest user experience for crypto trading and DeFi. We designed revolutionary approaches to security and identity for KYC that could be a model for the banking industry and regulators, and have solved the problems of high gas fees and massive energy consumption with the Proton Chain so you can scale sustainably with zero gas fees for mass uses like NFT activations by global brands .
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
One of the most important lessons I learned is to surround myself with the right people. I learned many good leadership lessons from the VP of Finance, Scott who hired me to help him with the marketing tech company IPO. He and I met while working with the same client: I was auditing the company as a public accountant, and they had hired him as a consultant to help them remedy some complicated accounting issues and mistakes. I’m a very tough auditor and it was a difficult project, but after that we kept in touch and he offered me a job at his next company, which I took as a huge compliment. He clearly saw we’d been able to work through the situation to achieve the right end result, and how my abilities could make his IPO project successful.
Over time, Scott put me in positions where I could shine and he showed me how he did this with other team members, too. I learned the hard way what happens when you don’t put the right people in the right positions, and how to identify the skills of each team member and utilize them in the best way possible. He helped me grow my own skills and understand my strengths and weaknesses. I am not afraid to call out my weaknesses, yet this can be extremely difficult for leaders to admit. We all have areas where we can improve, and sometimes you just need to accept that someone else will be better at certain things. This is why surrounding yourself with people with complementary strengths, giving them credit when they help you succeed, and being willing to go to bat for them as well, is crucial. Scott and I continue to have a fantastic mentor-mentee relationship, and I use him as a sounding board for hard decisions to this day.
What are the 3 things that most excite you about blockchain and crypto? Why?
I am excited about blockchain and crypto’s ability to provide basic financial services to people who would not otherwise have them. Maybe they don’t have a bank account or access to one or just want to send five or ten bucks or even a dollar to someone halfway around the world as easily as sending them an email without any fees or delays. DeFi products like Proton Loan also enable ordinary people to lend or borrow in a very innovative way, where loan contracts and collateral are visible on-chain and everything is pre-programmed to happen automatically so you never have to trust the other party is good for the interest and principal.
Second, crypto and traditional finance will inevitably come closer together and better security and compliance are essential for scaling digital assets for mass adoption by banks, enterprises and consumers. It simply is not practical to hold assets in parallel, bouncing from one to the other. The more interconnected we can make crypto and fiat, and use stablecoins as programmable money to drive new services, the more opportunities there will be to design a better and fairer financial system and defend against bad actors. Metallicus is working to create First Blockchain Bank and Trust, a national bank that will safely hold all of a person’s digital assets and link to an FDIC-insured bank account. This Bank will also understand the needs and challenges of companies in the crypto/blockchain space, those building the new technology, yet are not able to access or marry it with the traditional banking services.
Finally, we’re using blockchain for climate action. There is a big concern about the massive energy use and carbon footprint of the largest cryptocurrencies, so we developed the Proton Chain as one of the most environmentally friendly blockchains. Proton Chain has a very low carbon footprint and zero gas fees — and both of these are needed for a blockchain to scale economically viable climate solutions. That is what we’re doing with BiocharNow, pairing their revolutionary carbon sequestration process with the Proton blockchain in order to sell verifiable and tradable carbon credit tokens to corporations that need major offsets as part of their carbon reduction strategies and net zero target commitments.
What are the 3 things that worry you about blockchain and crypto? Why?
Crypto Winter is providing valuable lessons for the community, exposing weaknesses and vulnerabilities that were visible but tolerated in a bull market. I hope the takeaway will not just be “keep building” but “build differently.” Some of the companies in the news lately exposed the risks of algorithmic stablecoins and unregulated lending platforms. We need true stablecoins fully backed by reserves and true DeFi where everything is visible on open blockchains and uses smart contracts and collateral to manage risk in a really efficient and transparent way. And developers are building better financial products but they need to understand regulation. That’s why Metallicus designs security, identity and compliance into products that fintechs and banks can integrate into customer offerings so they can access the blockchain economy.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?
Absolutely! And I know there is always more I can be doing. Perhaps most dear to my heart is working toward gender equality in tech in a very hands-on way through my leadership role at Golden Seeds. I know firsthand just how hard it is to build a company, especially for women entrepreneurs. Women-led start-ups get a tiny fraction of VC funding. I have met so many women with amazing ideas and stories so I strive to help these incredible female entrepreneurs raise money and make a difference in this world. I also like using my connections or knowledge about the blockchain and crypto space to support important causes. One of my proudest contributions has been with Le Sallay international school in France, which is hosting and educating Ukrainian refugee children together with their regular students. I helped them set up a NFT shop of the Proton Chain and am using my outreach to the crypto community to help raise funds and buy their very impressive art.
As you know there are not that many women in your industry. Can you share 5 things that you would advise to other women in the blockchain space to thrive?
- Educate yourself and stick to what you know, even if it’s not the most popular opinion.
- Always turn words into actions. There is a lot to do in the blockchain space and there is a lot of talk. Show, don’t tell. Under promise and overdeliver.
- With underrepresentation comes responsibility. Those of us who are leaders have a duty to be strong role models and pave the way for others. We need to avoid missteps but not be afraid to take risks.
- You need to develop a vision to build anything of enduring value. And a strong set of values to bring out your best self and keep you going when the going gets tough.
- Surround yourself with good people. No one is good at everything. Having people you trust with complementary strengths is the key to success as a leader.
Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the blockchain industry?
Hire more women and pay them the same as men. There is no excuse for not doing this, especially in an industry that wants to apply systems thinking to create a better world. Leadership has to come from the top and work its way systematically throughout the organization and across the industry. At Metallicus, I am proud to say 40% of our executive team is female and I’d like to believe I’m playing a positive role in bringing female talent into our company.
Also, teach people about blockchain, crypto, money and investing. This applies to men and women, but women tend to shy away from loud conversations led by men, even when the opinions shared by them are wrong. It’s on leadership in particular to help make space for women to speak. Finally, broadly, and this could be a separate conversation in its own right, as a society we need to better equip women with the knowledge and facts to make the right financial decisions, whatever the shape of their family, partnered or not.
What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?
“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it!” Jonathan Winters
To me it has always been a given that nothing is going to be handed to me on a silver platter or fall from the sky. You have to work really hard for everything you want. And if you want it badly enough, you have to work even harder. But you always have to have a goal, or a ship, to swim out to.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
As I watch my twelve-year-old grow up, I wish she could have no limits to her imagination and abilities to make all her dreams come to life. I wish this for all the children growing up nowadays. I believe that giving access to technology and banking through blockchain can achieve that. I also believe that this generation is going to hold more leaders accountable for their actions and their words. Again, blockchain plays an instrumental role in this. Bad actors cannot hide their ill-gotten gains, can’t steal someone’s identity or pretend to be someone else, can’t delegitimize elections and so on. So that way the blockchain can build public trust and accountability. We can create a more honest and accessible world for the current and next generation. It’s already happening!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter @irinaberkon, and on Metallicus’ social media channels and Medium!
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
