Choosing a Life in The Crypto Lane
Elena Sofia Giralt is on a quest to make blockchain deliver on its many promises.
By Jesús Armand Chapa Malacara
When Elena Sofia Giralt was interviewing with potential employers while studying for her MBA in 2017, the options before her felt uninspiring. On the one hand, there was banking. On the other, marketing for a consumer packaged goods company.
Then, she said, there was “the crypto door.”
In truth, Giralt didn’t know much about Web3, a term used to describe the new blockchain-based innovations that have most excited the tech world in recent years, and that include its most famous and notorious creation, cryptocurrencies. Still, the draw was immediate.
“Hanging out with cypherpunk activists and people who are using encryption technology to reinvent money,” Giralt said, was “the obvious one that aligned with my interests.” Five years later, Giralt declares, there’s no going back. “I’m not ever, not working in Web3.”
Now, Giralt’s profile is rising as a stateswoman for blockchain technologies among an increasingly visible subset of Web3 evangelists — particularly Latinxs — who want to harness innovations in tech-driven finance to transform everything from international banking to journalism.
When Giralt first stepped foot as a student on campus at the New York University Stern School of Business in 2016, she felt unsure of where business school would take her. “I didn’t even know ‘consulting’ was a job,” she said.
Almost immediately, she began to question the curriculum of traditional finance models. “It didn’t feel authentic to me,” she said. Then she took a course titled “Digital Currency, Blockchains, and the Future of the Financial Services Industry,” and felt it was a revelation.
David Yermack, chair of the finance department at Stern, was impressed by Giralt’s instant dedication to Web3. “She has a lot of imagination and is extremely sincere about the work that she takes on,” he said. Yermack identified Giralt as his best student in a class of about 250 that drew from both Stern and the NYU School of Law.
In Yermack’s class, Giralt dove into exploring the use of cryptocurrencies to send remittances, the cross-border money transfers typically sent home by immigrants making a living abroad. Considered one of the earliest uses for the technology, for Giralt they hit some personal notes.
She’d grown up seeing her mother send money to her family in South America. She was looking forward to learning more about Venezuela — her mother’s home country, and where her Cuban-born father grew up — and getting coursework done while practicing her Spanish.
As Giralt learned about digital currencies and prepared a survey of the crypto landscape in Venezuela as part of her final project for Yermack’s class, Venezuela was on course to reach a 65,000% annual inflation rate in 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund. In her research, Giralt found a growing community of people there using crypto to receive remittances. They were also using it to hold dollars in a dispersed, globalized network of computers–a hedge against the runaway inflation gripping the country.
As a financially stable American with only an academic understanding of those circumstances, Giralt said, “I learned so much about what it’s like to live in a hyperinflated economy and how resilient people can be with picking up new technology.”
The project highlighted the outsized adoption of blockchain technologies among Latinxs in the US as well as in Latin America, and gave Giralt’s a new perspective on her Latinidad within her own work. It also opened her eyes to the promise Web3 held for addressing problems important to her.
Giralt’s first job as a newly minted MBA in July of 2018 was at the Civil Media Foundation, a now-shuttered company determined to use blockchain protocols to verify news and combat misinformation.
“They were probably just a few years ahead of their time,” Giralt said, of the challenges of trying to tackle such complex problems using what is still, in many ways, a nascent technology.
That same month, Giralt founded the Meetup group Blockchain Latinx to discuss how Latinx communities are using Web3. “We’re not a monolithic block…every community has different opportunities and different challenges they’re facing,“ she said. “I just wanted to jam on that with other Latinos who understood [that].”
The group meets monthly, and has been mostly virtual since the start of the pandemic. Giralt leads the group through a presentation and then a discussion on a range of Web3 topics.
“She has a knack for breaking down very complicated topics into things any newcomer can understand,” said Andre Serrano, a former co-worker and long-standing Blockchain Latinx attendee and the co-founder of a fund called NovaBlock that invests in Web3 startups. “Anyone feels welcome,” he added.
Web3 technologies are those that rely on what is referred to as a “blockchain,” a system of computing that keeps simultaneous records of its users’ activity on many different, user-owned computers connected to the web. It regularly checks to make sure all the connected computers have the same records of activity. Within blockchains, those records are referred to as “ledgers.”
Blockchains are supposed to guard against the manipulation of those ledgers. Their design requires a majority of connected computers — known as “nodes” — to come to a consensus about what is legitimate activity, and then lock in that information across those nodes in a “chain” of records. Were someone to change the records on one node, their tampering would become apparent when compared to the chain of records distributed across the world.
Blockchain emerged in 2009 in response, in part, to the financial crisis of the time and “in the cradle of Occupy Wall Street,” as Giralt puts it. Its first creation was the Bitcoin blockchain and its corresponding digital currency of the same name. Scores of proponents swear it’ll wrest currencies from the control of central banks and remake money as we know it.
Many economists and finance professionals point out that digital currencies behave much more like an investment class than what is commonly understood to be a “currency.” As an investment, its value has far outpaced even the top-performing of more traditional asset classes. In 2011, one Bitcoin was trading for less than one dollar and a decade later it surpassed $68,000 apiece, before dropping to hover at around $30,000 over the past couple of weeks.
As a result of its volatility, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have captured the imaginations of multitudes of speculators hoping to get wealthy very quickly. It has also attracted many newcomers unversed in financial instruments and fraudsters hoping to capitalize on their naivete.
Giralt acknowledges that those chasing instant riches, including through questionable means, dominate the Web3 buzz. “The bad rap that crypto and blockchain get, it’s not out of nowhere,” she said.
Through Blockchain Latinx, she hopes to widen conversations about Web3 possibilities, among attendees that range from Web3 professionals to newcomers searching for get-rich-quick advice.
“I like to call it ‘a safe space for hot takes,’” Giralt said.
Those takes are often steeped in crypto world jargon.
In one recent gathering, Giralt gave a presentation on “automated market makers (AMMs),” the preferred term for blockchain variations of algorithms that have long dominated transactions at market making firms, the institutions that provide liquidity to exchange markets even in the absence of supply and demand. Another topic was “impermanent losses.” The concept refers to losses incurred when a cryptocurrency invested in an AMM dips, but the asset holder refrains from selling until the price rises again.
Participants also volleyed briefly on the risks of “yield farming,” which is when a holder invests crypto assets in a sort of crowd-sourced market maker–in crypto speak, a “liquidity pool.” The crypto pioneer and billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried recently suggested the value of these investments derives from a consensus among investors that they will have value, including in cases when they are “worth zero.”
Even in that landscape, Giralt remains dedicated to crypto technologies in the face of crypto’s most ardent skeptics. Of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the long-time consumer protection advocate and a vocal critic of cryptocurrencies, Giralt has thoughts. “She made a meme of herself,” Giralt said, in response to Warren denouncing the use of crypto to circumvent the sanctions imposed on Russia.
After Civil, Giralt moved to the Electric Coin Company, the creators of ZCash, a cryptocurrency that hopes to mimic cash in its anonymity and has been subject to criticisms about its launderability. Her own interest in ZCash, she says, lies in helping create a product that can be used to escape surveillance by people living under repressive regimes.
Serrano, who worked with Giralt at the Electric Coin Company, said that she stood out there as “a champion for making crypto more inclusive.”
More recently, Giralt joined the marketing team at Hiro Systems, a company trying to expand uses of the Bitcoin blockchain beyond trading and the creation of more of its native currency.
Giralt returns to the idealism that drives her when she speaks of the missions of her three employers and of her extensive involvement in building Web3 communities. “Those are all projects that are really committed to improving digital infrastructure, so people can have better lives online,” she said.
Dulce Villareal, Giralt’s friend and co-organizer of San Francisco-based events for Blockchain Latinx, described Giralt as a rare species working at this particular intersection of finance and tech.
“With Elena, It’s never transactional. It’s about building beautiful things for Latino communities,” she said. “It’s hard to find these values in the blockchain industry.”
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