The future is female.? This month we wanted to focus on the stories of some influential women who are helping shape play-to earn gaming, crypto, blockchain, NFT’s and the entire Web3.
Women have always been a driving force behind social change and development. We’ve been everywhere leading change towards progress, one step at a time!. (Yes, I placed myself in that category!) It’s therefore no surprise with the recent advances in Web 3.0 that women will also play a huge part in its advancement.
UGG wanted to focus on some female founders & leaders who are not just helping change the world dominated by men but also to help inspire others through bravely sharing stories about themselves in order for them to be heard across borders and generations.
Let’s take a look at these female founders and influencers in the world of Web3 who have been pushing against all odds to make it in a male-dominated domain.
Beryl Li, Co-Founder of Yield Guild Games
Beryl Li is the Co-Founder of Yield Guild Games, a play-to-earn gaming company that brings players together to earn via blockchain based economies. As one of their start-ups in the Asia Pacific region to have raised funds from A16Z’s leading venture capital firm based out of the United States, they were already able to generate over $7M dollars worth income for its 2500+ member workforce–all while paying out more than >$1M to its players weekly!
After seeing how Bitcoin could reduce fees for cross-border payments, Beryl became a founding team member of Coins.ph in 2014 and has been fascinated by crypto ever since. She furthered on as she found YGG with Gabby Dixon when they noticed that Filipinos were converting NFTs earned from playing Axie Infinity into fiat money so people would have something nutritious on their plates instead – as a means to counter the economic effects brought upon by the pandemic on their daily livelihoods; a very sound example among many others where blockchain technology is being used around the world.
“More powerful than “banking the unbanked” is providing an option for anyone to earn a living or extra income. What we’re doing at Yield Guild is giving people access to NFTs that they can use to earn in-game rewards, which they can exchange for real money and turn into an alternative, supplemental income — simply through their time and skill. Play-to-earn then becomes a way to provide DeFi, which makes it the perfect platform for financial education. Players have a real democracy over what they would like to do with their rewards.
YGG’s mission is to onboard millions of people into the play-to-earn revolution. To date, there are over 100,000 guild members and over 10,000 YGG scholars around the world. Most are located in developing countries from Southeast Asia and Latin America, YGG’s two primary areas of growth. Countries include the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Venezuela. Apart from this, YGG also has players and community contributors from the United States and Europe.” —Beryl Li
Janine Yorio, Co-founder & CEO of Everyrealm
Janine Yorio has a background in private equity and real estate that she used to launch Everyrealm, which is an online platform for managing digital assets.
Having successfully sold her real estate investing app Compound to Republic, she started gambling on metaverse properties as a hobby. Everyrealm simply defines its existence as an active player in the metaverse who invests in, manages, and develops assets including NFTs, virtual real estate, metaverse platforms, gaming, and infrastructure.
To her, the most important thing to understand about developing in the metaverse and making NFTs is that they need communities. And she believes that women have more edge in nurturing communities more than men.
“The only way the metaverse becomes interesting is if there are things to do and people to see and places to go when you get there.” —Janine Yorio, The Real Deal
Bozena Rezab, CEO and Co-Founder of GAMEE
Bozena Rezab, is the CEO and Co-Founder of GAMEE, a mobile gaming company that delivers games via messaging bots like Facebook Messenger, Kik and Telegram alongside its own app.
GAMEE’s mission is recognise and reward effort, skillfulness and loyalty of its users. With recent introduction from their mobile gaming platform which brings esports to everyone Arc 8 has been successful in increasing gamings systems user base towards Polygon exceeding Etherum number wallet owning crypto enthusiasts.
The future of gaming is now in blockchain according to Rezab’s presentation at Token2049 as she revealed that Arc-8 has created a platform where users can play skill based games, host their own tournaments and pitch proposals to others for voting. This could lead to them becoming an officially hosted event or even having one popular game added onto the site after being voted on by players like you—the general public!
Allyson Downey, co-founder of Meta Angels
Allyson Downey’s introduction to non-fungible tokens was through her coworker Max Siegman, who she calls “our NFT encyclopedia”.
She once spent a weekend researching and educating herself on the space before diving in headfirst. Once inside, Allie became completely absorbed by it – so much that when friend Alexandra Cavoulacos reached out asking if they could work together on an idea for some new cryptocurrency products designed specifically around art appreciation they jumped at the chance a few weeks later.
Meta Angels, is defined as an NFT membership community that aims to harness the metaverse to unlock real life opportunities. Founded on the values of generosity, transparency, and accessibility. Currently, boasting a collection of 10,000 unique Meta Angels, generated from over 300 hand drawn elements and stored as ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain.
“We wanted to build out something that brought everybody to the table, regardless of their life experience to date, as long as they share the same core values of generosity of spirit, transparency and a belief in getting other people into the room.”— Allyson Downey
Melissa Romero, Head of The Gamechangers at Lunam Labs
Before jumping into crypto and NFT gaming, Melissa had many years of experience in the food industry. She has worked for brands that cover a wide range of CPG categories, including marketing and general management-type roles. Her proven track record includes building successful brands while managing multifunctional teams to deliver business goals such as revenue growth or brand penetration
The Gamechangers is a women-led DAO that provides financing for female founders. Head of this organization, Melissa Romero points out there’s no such thing as “the glass ceiling” and anyone can come help shape what our future will look like.
“This is being built as we speak. In other words, there is no glass ceiling, there is no seat at the table you have to be invited for; come and help shape together what this future looks like.” —Melissa Romero
Princess Hazel Mata aka “Hezelya”
A wild card amongst the people in the list. We bring you Princess Hazel Mata aka “Hezelya”, a known Content Creator for Bren Esports & Real Deal Guild.
She is known as the First Axie Creator Cup Champion and a prominent Axie Infinity Streamer whose clout extends to over half a million followers on all her social media accounts.
Hazel is also a proud member of the all female team of Bren E-Sports as they recently won the recently concluded FSL Dota 2 2021 tournament.
There is no reason why women should be limited in their potential as these 5 women have shown us. They can do anything that men could, if given the chance.
Creativity is something that has been often linked with femininity. The traditional roles of women in our society can make them feel limited, but there are so many creative ways to break free from those chains.
Women have always been able to bring their true selves out when it comes down to it and not worry about what others think or say because they’re doing things differently than everyone else – just take the example given by the women we have featured & their unrelenting stories of creativity and breaking boundaries.
Here at UGG, we believe in women’s creativity and skills continuing to grow not just in the metaverse but all over – now, more than ever when decentralization and an open market is the path to the future. Exciting times!
Editor’s note: Check out some more of our sole femme writer Marie’s work here: She wrote about the biggest exploit in DeFi history and frequently does a great job pushing out the listen notes for the CrypTalk Podcast!