Galia Benartzi is using blockchain to rethink our relationship with money. And in doing so she is paving the way for alternative means of collaboration, making us question what’s possible to create an accessible internet of value. As the Cofounder and Head of Business Development for Bancor, a blockchain protocol that allows for conversion between different tokens directly, Benartzi is democratizing access to coins that are difficult to exchange because they are less known (and are thereby illiquid), enabling people to create and utilize them (in communities, for example) as a result. In addition to her work with Bancor, this summer Benartzi held a Global Economic Visioning Summit at Bretton Woods, the historic location where the international monetary management rules between the United States and other allied nations were established during WWII.

Benartzi, who was raised in Silicon Valley by Israeli parents—they moved to Israel when she was in junior high and back to California when she was in high school—studied comparative literature at Dartmouth College and International Relations and economics (with a focus on energy) at SAIS Johns Hopkins. After founding several successful startups (Mytopia, a social gaming studio sold to 888 Holdings, ParticleCode, a mobile gaming and HTML5 development platform sold to Appcelerator), she decided to focus her energy on the opportunity that the cryptocurrency markets could create for humanity. “Every person is born with the ability and opportunity to create value for society. The tools or the tokens or the infrastructure that we use to give this value to others, to receive this value from others, should be an open and accessible infrastructure. It shouldn’t be owned by governments, companies, or specific people,” says Benartzi. “We see the network that lets humans give and get value from each other, whatever that value may be, as a fundamental right of people on this planet.”