The Drofa Comms team is happy to share that the fourth Women Leading the Way podcast chapter has been released! Its hero is Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of AltiusLabs, which is a blockchain infrastructure company building high-performance chains for the next phase of Web3.
Annabelle’s career path spans the full arc of the industry. She started at Deutsche Bank in New York and then joined AirSwap (one of Ethereum’s earliest DEXs). Later, she spent years at Amber Group. There, she was building its trading operations from the ground up.
Along the way, she kept running into one and the same obstacle. The industry had largely solved for liquidity, but infrastructure remained weak and underdeveloped.
In this episode, Annabelle sits down with host Maria Tunikova to trace what it actually takes for crypto to become a real financial infrastructure. She walks through why general-purpose chains are giving way to purpose-built, application-specific ones.
The conversation also covers the regulatory side. Annabelle argues that policy has become the real progress, with the GENIUS Act showing what a single piece of legislation can do for stablecoin adoption. In turn, the CLARITY Act could do the same for tokenised assets. The ideas themselves, she notes, go back to 2017, yet what is new is the regulatory framework around them.
The second half turns to what it means to found and lead in technical corners of Web3. Annabelle speaks honestly about the challenges she faces. They include how leadership style gets read, who survives on your team, and what it takes to over-correct yourself to fit a room. Also, she mentors early-stage founders. So, when asked what women need most at the beginning, her answer is confidence and its deliberate, conscious part.
Listen to the new episode devoted to blockchain infrastructure evolution on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
