We're delighted to share that the 4th episode of Women Leading the Way is out! This one features Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of AltiusLabs — 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, then joined AirSwap (one of Ethereum's earliest DEXs) and later spent years at Amber Group. Literally, she was building its trading operations from the ground up.

Along the way, she kept running into 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 one of the most 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, and when asked what women need most at the beginning, her answer is confidence and the deliberate, conscious practice of it.

Listen to the new episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.