A conversation with Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi, about six years of building one of crypto's largest education communities, why frictionless onboarding isn't what every user actually wants, and where the agentic and institutional waves are quietly converging.
The idea for SheFi arrived on a run in 2019. Love had been at ConsenSys long enough to live through the 2018 bear market, and as the first DeFi teams began to form she noticed two things at once: people were earning twenty percent on their tokens through MakerDAO and Compound, and none of the people building or talking about it on stage at ETHDenver looked like her.
The name came mid-stride, the way good names sometimes do. The first cohort, called The Date with SheFi, ran over Zoom during lockdown.
Six years later, what started as a friends-and-family experiment has become a global community of roughly 30,000 women, non-binary folks, and Gen Z members, with chapter leads in cities around the world and a course graduates have used as a stepping stone into jobs across the industry.
The conversation, which marks SheFi's six-year anniversary, traces both how much has changed and how little. Three pillars have stayed constant from the beginning: education through analogy, experimentation through onchain quests, and community.
What has shifted is the curriculum's surface area. In the early days Love could cover DeFi in a slide because there were five protocols worth knowing. Then came yield farming, NFTs, DAOs, layer twos, privacy — too many topics to teach properly. The current course is leaner, focused on what lasts.
The community layer has gone the other direction, expanding into in-person summits, chapter leads, and a newly announced paid membership tier built around career support.
The most interesting stretch of the conversation is on whether crypto's onboarding problem is finally getting solved. Love can argue both sides convincingly. Privy, the Base app, and the new Aave app point toward a future where users sign in with email or Face ID and never see a seed phrase, and institutional issuers are clearly going app-first because they would rather you not know it's crypto at all.
But she pushes back on the assumption that frictionless is what every user actually wants. Some of her cohort members specifically reject biometric login because the entire point, for them, is agency and sovereignty. The likely future is not one super app but many flavors of crypto for different kinds of people — some optimized for ease, others for privacy or self-custody, with the friction priced in on purpose.
The other axis of the conversation is the intersection of crypto and AI, where Love has a clear thesis. The most obvious convergence point, she argues, is agentic commerce. Internet-native beings will use internet-native money.
Love also flags two trends she thinks are louder in her inbox than they are on crypto Twitter.
The first is that the same FOMO archetype that defined DeFi summer in 2020 has migrated wholesale to AI. The hype cadence, the screenshots of overnight returns, the sense that you will be permanently behind if you sit out a week — Love sees the same energy and the same kind of curious, agency-seeking person showing up to learn.
The second is that institutional adoption is happening faster than the public storyline suggests, just very quietly.
Layer ones and layer twos that are no longer minting headlines are running pilots with major banks, building private stablecoin infrastructure, and figuring out how to bake privacy and reporting into Wall Street workflows.
The throughline, six years in, is that crypto and the people building it are growing up at the same time. Careers that used to lead to five-person DeFi startups now lead to stablecoin issuers and institutional finance.
Curriculum that used to chase every new protocol has compressed to fundamentals plus AI.
The exciting next chapter, in Love's reading, is not a single breakout moment but a quieter accumulation: agents transacting on our behalf, institutions transacting on rails most users will never see, and a community whose members increasingly find themselves shaping the system they once needed permission to enter.
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