Jon and I just got back from a week in Italy. One day we were walking around Florence and stumbled into a small bookstore where we saw the Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s encyclical subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

In it, the Pope warns us not to use people as a means to an end:

“I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized.”

• Magnifica Humanitas, 51 (emphasis mine)

While confronting the idea of using other people as a tool is interesting–what the pope calls “instrumentalization”--I’m just as curious about how we use ourselves.

After 7 years of running SheFi, and 4 years of not having a job, I sometimes wonder: “Why am I valuable? What am I even good at?”

I then search around for my resume bulletpoints:

• I worked at IBM Watson

• I cofounded a neocloud company with AMD

• I built a community of 30,000 women

• Etc.

But the reality is, my value isn’t any of these things. If I had fewer bulletpoints, I wouldn’t be less valuable, and if I had more bulletpoints I wouldn’t be more valuable.

This is an exercise in justification. Giving myself permission to consider myself valuable. If I don’t have enough evidence, I can’t grant myself permission, and I can’t therefore be valuable. That is my logic.

I know this is true because as I’ve collected more bulletpoints in my career, my assessment of my own self-worth has not gone up in relation. It’s still sideways. I’m always one or two bulletpoints away from being worthy.

The reality is, you will never have enough bulletpoints to make you valuable. You have to find an inherent source of value.

For me, my very existence is the source of my value. By virtue of being on this planet, I know I have a calling.

While everyone’s relationship to faith is different, mine is a source of great confidence for me. I know God brought me to this planet for a purpose. Regardless of my bulletpoints, I treat my life as a living example of belief.

It reminds me that I don’t need a resume to do things. I’ve never needed a resume to do things. I got into crypto with no experience in the industry–I heard about it and did it. I started SheFi with no experience as an entrepreneur. I gave birth with no experience as a mother!

You don’t need a resume to live the life you want or to see inherent value in yourself. You need faith in yourself, confidence in your ability, and the desire to change.

That’s what SheFi is about.

Crypto + AI Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

Crypto Roundup.

• Europe's full crypto rulebook, MiCA, hit total enforcement today. The 18-month grace period is over, and the cutoff is brutal. Of the 1,200-plus firms that used to operate under national licenses, only about 210 made it through to the new EU-wide license. Everyone else has to stop serving European customers or leave. The winners are the big players who filed early: Binance in France, Coinbase and Kraken in Ireland, OKX in Malta. The losers are the smaller shops that couldn't stomach a compliance bill north of 500,000 euros a year. Stablecoins took the hardest hit, with USDT pulled from European exchanges while USDC and its euro version survived. Europe just swapped a crowded, messy market for a small, licensed one. Whether that means more safety or just more friction is the question nobody can answer yet.

• Total crypto stolen actually fell in June, down 7% to about $76 million across 40 hacks. But one project accounted for nearly half of that on its own. Humanity Protocol, the palm-scanning digital ID project we flagged a few weeks back, lost around $32 million. The cause is the whole story of 2026. Not clever code, but a private key lifted off a developer's malware-infected laptop. Stolen keys, not broken smart contracts, are behind most crypto theft this year, and investigators traced part of the Humanity money to laundering linked to North Korea's Lazarus group. The code got harder to break, so the attackers went after the people instead.

• Crypto just became the biggest corporate spender in American politics. The industry has put $189 million into the 2026 midterms so far, more than it spent in all of 2024, and that's over a third of every corporate political dollar this cycle. Coinbase and Ripple are the two largest backers of Fairshake, the main pro-crypto super PAC, with Ripple alone in for nearly $49 million. The money is chasing one outcome: passage of the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would lock in friendlier rules, currently stalled in the Senate. It doesn't always work. A Ripple-backed candidate just lost a New York primary after his opponent turned the crypto money itself into the issue. But with four months to go and a war chest still loaded, the industry is betting that shaping who writes the rules matters more than any single race.

AI Roundup.

• Two weeks after the government forced it offline, Claude Fable 5 is coming back tomorrow. Anthropic says it worked things out with the US government and is redeploying the model with new filters that block cybersecurity tasks specifically, while routine work like coding falls back to the still-available Opus 4.8. The bigger move is behind it: Anthropic is drafting a shared framework with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for how the industry should rate the severity of AI jailbreaks and respond to them, and it's giving the government pre-release access to test future models before they ship. The era of frontier models launching whenever the company feels like it is over. The government has a seat at the table now.

• OpenAI launched its next generation, GPT-5.6, in three tiers: Sol the powerful flagship, Terra the balanced everyday model, and Luna the cheap high-volume one. Same story as Fable, though. At the Trump administration's request over national security, it's locked to about 20 government-approved partners for now, with a broader release promised in the coming weeks. On cybersecurity tests, Sol matches Anthropic's most powerful model using a third of the compute. The names are new on purpose: the number is the generation, the name is the tier, so each can move on its own schedule. This is the second frontier launch this month to ship through a government gate instead of straight to the public.

• Anthropic also shipped Sonnet 5 this week, and this is the one you can actually use today. It performs close to Opus 4.8, the flagship, for less than half the price at its launch rate, and on knowledge work it slightly beats it. The real story is what it can do. One tester handed it a two-part job, update the Salesforce records and send a launch announcement to enterprise contacts, and it finished the whole thing end to end. Work that stalled halfway a few months ago now runs on the cheap tier. Agentic capability just became the baseline at every price, which means the race isn't about who's smartest anymore. It's about who's cheapest.

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.

07/10 Virtual: Investment Club with Sam Ragsdale: Members only

Join the SheFi Investment Club every Friday at 11am EST! You can find the zoom link on Mighty Networks.

07/02-03 Munich: Ethereum for the Real World: RSVP here

July 2-3rd in Munich, the Deutsches Museum becomes the home of ETHis - Ethereum for the Real World.

Two days of programming across the tracks that matter most right now: RWAs, DePIN, ZK, privacy, governance, AI. SheFi members helped build the protocols on that stage. Come see what that room looks like.

Here's a 20% code for 2-day passes (not possible for the 1-day ones): 1KEFVKPDWYWS

07/03 Lisbon: SheFi Lisbon X TheBlock: RSVP here

​Join us for a SheFi Summer Meetup at The Block Lisboa, hosted on the rooftop patio as the city settles into a warm Friday evening in July! It’s a chance to catch up, meet new faces, and enjoy a relaxed after-work hangout.

07/11 Laguna: SheFi Philippines Official Launch: RSVP here

Join the official launch of SheFi Philippines, bringing together women, allies, builders, founders, creators, students, and professionals interested in exploring opportunities in Web3, digital finance, and emerging technologies.

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

Hey ladies 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!

Celebrating SheFi Successes 🎉

• Aelia passed Level 4 of Korea's official TOPIK language proficiency exam.

• Chantal gave her first virtual presentation on Intro to DeFi with Women in Blockchain East Africa.

Crypto Events 🌎

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

• 07/03 Istanbul: İstanbul | Arc Institutional Happy Hour with Huma Finance & e2vc: RSVP here

• 07/11 San Francisco: The Pink Screen IRL: Vibe Lab: 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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