On 9–10 September, Women Leading the Way joined Crypto Expo Dubai 2026 as an official media partner, bringing our focus on women in finance, fintech and Web3 to one of the region’s major crypto events.

As part of the programme, Maria Tunikova, Project Lead at Women Leading the Way, moderated the panel Women Building Trust in Crypto: Governance, Security, and Market Confidence.

She was joined by Dr. Lisa Cameron, Founder of the UKUS Crypto Alliance and former UK Member of Parliament; Anna Arzua MacMillan, Founder of the Women in Investment Network and Co-Founder of Venture Factore; and Lasbery Oludimu, Group Vice President of Operations at Yellow Card Financial.

Between them, the panel brought together three very different perspectives on the digital asset market: policy, capital and the realities of running a crypto business across multiple jurisdictions.

This panel was arranged around one question: what actually makes people trust crypto today?

Crypto Regulation Is Only the Starting Point for Building Trust

As for regulation, companies now need to build around licensing requirements, investors have to assess regulatory exposure, while teams working across several markets face very different rules from one jurisdiction to another.

The panel approached this issue from both sides.

From the policy perspective, the question is how regulation can provide greater certainty without falling behind the technology it is meant to govern. From the business side, there is a challenge of translating those rules into everyday processes across different countries.

In other words, having a licence can provide an important layer of confidence, but regulation alone cannot answer every question a customer or investor may have. They also need to understand who controls assets, how decisions are made, and which protections exist in reality.

As crypto develops into financial infrastructure, trust primarily depends on how regulation is implemented rather than simply if it exists or not.

Crypto Security and Trust Depend on Everyday Performance

Maria then moved the discussion from regulation to the topic of what users actually experience.

Most people do not interact with governance frameworks or compliance policies every day. They see whether a payment arrives, if their information is protected or not, whether a platform remains available and how quickly a company responds when there is a problem.

This is especially relevant for companies working in markets where digital assets and stablecoins already have practical applications in payments and cross-border transfers.

Security, therefore, cannot work separately from the product. It's a must-have thing for building trust.

As the sector matures, governance, cybersecurity and operational controls form part of the experience itself. A company may have strong technology on paper, but confidence be undermined if its infrastructure fails when users actually need it.

What Does “Institutional-Grade” Actually Mean?

Institutional adoption was another major theme throughout Crypto Expo Dubai, but the panel approached it from a more untrivial angle.

Before capital moves into digital assets, institutions need more than an interesting technology or a strong market narrative. They assess custody, governance, legal structure, liquidity, security and the reliability of the infrastructure behind the product.

Yet, how much of the trust gap can regulation solve, and how much still has to be solved by businesses themselves?

For builders, regulatory uncertainty can influence where a company launches, how its product is structured and which investors it can realistically approach. For capital providers, meanwhile, regulatory status is one part of a much larger due-diligence process.

That is why the phrase “institutional-grade” deserves more scrutiny. It has become common language in digital assets, but serious institutional participation ultimately depends on evidence that the infrastructure can perform as promised.

Women Are Already Part of How This Market Is Being Built

What made this panel particularly relevant to Women Leading the Way was not just that all of the speakers were women.

Each represented a different layer of an industry that is still deciding how digital assets will fit into the wider financial system: policymaking, investment and business execution.

Their careers also illustrate something we repeatedly see through our interviews and events. Women in Web3 are working on regulation, allocating capital, managing companies throughout multiple countries and building the infrastructure behind the sector.

Giving those perspectives greater visibility remains one of the central reasons of why Women Leading the Way exists.

As the industry moves towards practical financial applications, discussions around trust will only become more specific: who is responsible, how the infrastructure performs, where capital goes and whether regulation can keep pace with the market.

Those are the themes we intend to keep following.

Stay with Women Leading the Way for more interviews, discussions and insights from women shaping finance, fintech and Web3!