WiB Spotlight: Tina
WiB Spotlight is a Q&A series by Women in Blockchain where we highlight women and non-binary leaders building in the crypto space.
Introducing Tina from EigenLayer! EigenLayer is a protocol built on Ethereum that introduces staking, a new primitive in cryptoeconomic security. In this month’s WiB Spotlight, we talk to Tina about how she got into the industry and her role at EigenLayer.
WIB: What exactly do you do right now?
Tina: I work on product and strategy lat EigenLayer, working on the staking and operating team and EigenDA, and assisting in doing engineering specifications, working with partners we have integrations with, drafting press releases and coordinating the go-to-market launch with them. When people ask what I do, it’s really hard to describe because it’s really just assisting the product launch at every step of the process.
WIB: I definitely want to ask you more about EigenLayer in a second, but let’s talk about you- where’d you grow up? How did you get into crypto? Was there a particular moment that pushed you into this space?
Tina: I was born in Tehran. My parents escaped the Iranian Revolution and studied in the United States and moved to Canada. They were both well-educated, they had master’s degrees and they were passionate advocates for education, women’s rights, and the development of the Iranian people. My mom co-founded a women’s shelter and my dad did academic research at a university. Doing these things as a first-generation immigrant is really hard. There’s literally every single obstacle you can think of.
The first thing that got me interested in crypto was when Iran had sanctions put on them. This was something that was mentioned in my history class in passing and it was interesting to me how a nation’s currency was devalued. Through conversations with my parents and grandma, I understood that this was affecting the whole of society there. I went through college and studied computer science, was very involved on campus, and realized I wanted to work in tech. After graduation, while I was working for a Canadian bank as a front-end engineer, I saw the girl beside me working on the trading desk. I was so intrigued because she was checking the Bloomberg Terminal for news updates and then making trades based on those updates. She was doing fixed income, spot trading. She brought up bitcoin and cryptocurrency as well, so that was my first exposure to the space.
WIB: Let’s talk about EigenLabs. I’ve read the EigenLayer whitepaper written by the EigenLabs team, but for our general audience, if you had to explain what EigenLayer protocol was in simple terms, how would you describe it?
Tina: Well, the way I explain it to my sister is, I’m working on developer infrastructure that people can build apps on top of, making them more trustless, programmable and completely decentralized.
WIB: EigenLayer is everywhere, people are talking about the product constantly, it has gotten insane traction in the last year. I’m very curious to know what that’s been like for the company and for you.
Tina: Sreeram (CEO of EigenLayer) is an incredible leader. A lot of crypto startups have a super high turnover of maybe 1–2 years. Every single person on our research team has been here at least 3–4 years, either as Sreeram’s grad students or have some ties to him discovering him as a professor in Seattle. The majority of the team have been there since the early stage, which is really inspiring and shows the conviction and faith people have in him.
WIB: Is this something you see yourself doing forever, working in crypto?
Tina: Actually, no. A lot of people get shocked when I say that. I think there are two paths through which the blockchain ecosystem will develop. As web developers and application developers continue to build out apps and infrastructure, application developers will always be the primary top of the funnel access to retail customers. For our industry to develop and succeed, it needs to be regulatory compliant. People don’t like hearing that. But the fact of the matter is we’re building infrastructure to improve the systems that have failed us in the traditional world, as well as infrastructure that people can build upon for their own use. The systems we are building are inherently for the public good and can be utilized in different contexts.
My mom works in government so I’ve always believed in the good of government. My future probably would be in building on this technology in another ecosystem because if we want to get mainstream adoption and grow the blockchain industry as a whole, it means building outside just this industry. I love building with the EigenLayer team and continuously building for other industries, but for me the end-game would be to build and try to onboard more people from other industries that aren’t interacting with the blockchain right now.
