When I was a kid, I used to go to an after school enrichment program with my brothers. Think Kumon, but gamified. At the front of the room, there was a large wood mountain with climbing figures of different colors who represented your progress. Every session, when you completed your work, the little climbing man moved higher.

It was a tiny thing, but I loved watching my little figure climb. It was motivating to see my and my brothers’ progress in real time. It created both friendly competition and camaraderie among us. 

At SheFi, we’ve always run quests–live challenges to teach you the latest in crypto and AI. Not long ago, SheFi members would complete quests through Typeform, and then nothing. Progress wouldn’t be displayed anywhere, and you couldn’t share or see achievements.

We exported the data manually. We calculated the results in a spreadsheet. And we sent follow-up e-mails using Zapier automation to help people complete them. There was no social component. No shared sense of momentum. No little climbing figure saying, “Look how far you’ve come.”

I knew what I wanted the experience to feel like, but I had no idea how to build it.

I had never pushed a pull request on GitHub. I had never shipped a software product. In the past, I would have needed to find an engineer, explain the idea, write a specification, and hope it worked.

AI changes all that.

A few months ago I opened Claude Code and typed: “I want to build a dashboard that visualizes where people are in their questing journey. Interview me about the product.”

Not “build this for me.”

Interview me.

Claude’s interview questions helped me turn my instincts into a product. What data did we already have? What should people see first? What would make them want to complete the next quest? How could the experience feel personal without creating more manual work?

I connected Typeform, Notion, GitHub, and Vercel. I built an agent that could see which quests someone had completed and send a personalized nudge toward the next one.

And then I opened the first pull request of my life.

A few hours later, the dashboard was live. It looked good! It showed people where they were, and it made an individual journey feel like part of something bigger.

Then we announced it to the SheFi cohort.

Quest completions went up immediately.

As I suspected, having some positive enforcement changed behavior.

People did not need a complicated rewards system. They just needed to see their progress, get clear next steps, and know they were not questing alone.

The time from “I have an idea” to “here’s a link to the product” has essentially gone to zero.

If you have a problem, you now have access to a new and powerful form of agency: the ability to build anything.

You can start with messy spreadsheets and manual processes and e-mails.

But if you get curious about it, you can build the solution you want.

Ask the AI to interview you. Push the pull request. Build the little climbing figure.

See you in class,

Maggie

PS. If you want to join our quests this season and see yourself on the leaderboard as we explore Solana, complete the quest below. You can also still join SheFi Season 17. Classes begin July 21st.

Crypto + AI Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

Crypto Roundup.

• Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, just got approval to become a federally regulated bank. The OCC signed off on Circle National Trust, which means the second-biggest stablecoin issuer now sits inside the same regulatory system as the banks it set out to disrupt. Sony Bank got the same green light the same week for its own dollar-stablecoin trust bank. This is exactly what the GENIUS Act was built to enable: stablecoin issuers stepping onto formal banking rails instead of operating at the edge of them. The line between "crypto company" and "bank" is quietly disappearing, and the companies minting digital dollars want to end up on the bank side of it.

• Robinhood launched its own blockchain, and in its first week, Robinhood Chain processed more than 17 million transactions, pulled in 350,000 active wallets, and did over $1 billion in trading volume, overtaking Hyperliquid. Built on Arbitrum, it's designed to let Robinhood's tens of millions of users trade tokenized stocks and crypto on rails the company controls. For an app most people know as a place to buy stocks, standing up its own chain is a real statement of intent. The mainstream apps millions already use are quietly turning into crypto companies, and their users may cross over without ever noticing the moment it happens.

• Galaxy Digital rolled out a managed lending product that lets big institutions borrow from DeFi without ever touching it themselves. It's called GOFR. Galaxy taps a handful of onchain lending protocols behind the scenes (Aave, Morpho, Spark, Kamino), blends their rates into one, and hands the client a single borrowing rate while running all the wallets, keys, and smart contracts. The client's only counterparty is Galaxy. The minimum loan is $1 million, and Galaxy is putting up $100 million of its own capital as a first-loss buffer. It's the clearest picture yet of how institutions actually want DeFi: all of the yield, none of the plumbing, and a familiar name to call if something breaks.

AI Roundup.

• The AI models running inside American companies are increasingly Chinese. A CNBC investigation found that Chinese open-source models now handle 30 to 46% of the enterprise AI traffic flowing through US developer platforms, up from around 11% a year ago. One model, Z.ai's GLM-5.2, grew its usage 27-fold in a single week after launch. The reason is simple: these models now perform close to the American frontier and cost 60 to 90% less. US labs still hold the lead on the very top-end capabilities, but for everyday business work, companies are quietly routing more and more of it through models built in China, because the math is hard to argue with.

• Apple sued OpenAI last Friday, accusing it of stealing trade secrets to build its own AI hardware. The suit centers on two former Apple employees now at OpenAI, including its new chief hardware officer, who Apple says walked out with confidential files on unreleased products and even coached job candidates on which Apple secrets to study before their interviews. What OpenAI is building with all of it: a screenless AI device, reportedly a smart speaker with a camera plus a wearable, designed with Apple's former design chief Jony Ive. The twist is that Apple's own lawsuit, by listing every secret it claims was taken, has become the most detailed public map yet of the gadget OpenAI won't officially confirm exists. OpenAI says the claims have no merit.

• Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, published the manifesto behind her new $2 billion startup Thinking Machines Lab, and it's a direct shot at how AI is being built. The essay, "The Future Worth Building Is Human," argues that today's AI is trained in a few big labs and then frozen, so everyone ends up with the same model shaped by the same handful of people's values. Her alternative: many AIs, each shaped by the people and communities they actually serve, with tools that let you build your own knowledge and values into the model itself instead of just prompting it. She even quotes Pope Leo's AI encyclical, that a more moral AI isn't enough if that morality is decided by a few. The idea underneath it is worth sitting with: AI should extend what a person can do, not replace it, and no single company should get to decide what "good" looks like for everyone.

SheFi Global Events 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

07/21-22 Toronto: EthWomen Toronto: RSVP here

Hey Toronto and Florida ladies! SheFi wants to extend the invitation to you from ETHWomen. We welcome you to a women focused section of the growing Futurist Conference. Completely free to join!

07/23 Lisbon: GrowFi Aperitivo - Onchain Lisbon Week: RSVP here

Join us for an outdoor aperitivo featuring organic Sicilian wine, extra virgin olive oil tastings, and Pane Cunzato. We'll share the GrowFi story, run a live demo of the platform so you can start yield farming live campaigns.

07/28 Virtual: Ana Westfal: Soluções práticas com IA e Vibecoding: RSVP here

Ana Westfal, Growth Product Manager at HOUS3, will share how she has used AI and vibe coding to create useful solutions in everyday life.

08/02 Jaipur: Road To Devcon – Women For Web3: RSVP here

Join us for Road to Devcon VIII India (Jaipur chapter) – Women in Web3 Edition, a curated gathering of Women and non-binary folks, celebrating diversity in the Ethereum ecosystem as we build momentum toward Devcon VIII in Mumbai this November.

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 07/17 Lisbon: Bitcoin Death Party - CryptoFriday x Buttcoiners.love: RSVP here

• 07/20 Virtual: Global Design Sprint: Harnessing Gender Data for Inclusive Regulation: RSVP here

• 07/21-22 Toronto: Blockchain Futurist Conference Toronto: RSVP here

• 10/08 San Francisco: InTheRoom: Trust, Presence & Connection - #SFTechWeek: RSVP here

• 11/17-18 Florida: EthWomen Florida: RSVP here

• Devcon 8 India Volunteer Application Form: Apply here

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