I was in line at a deli in Brooklyn Heights last week, squirming one-year-old on the hip, trying to order a turkey sandwich, when a woman tapped me on the shoulder.

"Sorry to interrupt," she said. "I completed SheFi Cohort 10. I just wanted to say hi."

So we stood there in the deli line and caught up. Her name is Katie Oppenheim and she’s on the digital innovation team at American Express. She’s the one bringing new digital collectibles to your rewards tab and stablecoins to institutions.

A SheFi run-in in the wild happened a few weeks before that, too. I was in Miami for Consensus, wrestling Summer's stroller through the gate of my building. A woman reached over, held the door, and helped grabbed my bags.

"Maggie, you probably don't know me," she said. "But I took SheFi."

Ale runs her own events company out of San Francisco and partners with protocols like Worldcoin and 0G.

I tell you these stories because when you build something on the internet, you start to believe that's the only place it can ever live. On little Zoom squares and Telegram pings and the graduation tweets at the end of every cohort.

I see the number every day: 30,700 women.

Thirty thousand, seven hundred.

It's on my dashboards, it's in my decks, it's the first thing I say when someone asks what SheFi is.

I see this number all the time, and sometimes it gets reduced to just a number.

But 30,700 women is a lot of women. It’s so many women that I run into you all the time, on the street, in a deli.

I forget sometimes that the number started at zero. I forget I've been doing this long enough that I will never meet, never see, and never know most of you.

Until you tap me on the shoulder in a deli line.

You’re not in my classroom anymore. You’re inside American Express and Mastercard and Coinbase and a hundred companies I'll never step foot inside of, building the next layer of the internet. Every so often you’ll hold a door, or tap a shoulder, and remind each other that the movement isn’t constrained to a screen anymore.

It's out in the world. It's everywhere. It's standing right next to you in line.

Financial Freedom is Feminine,

Maggie

→ Apply for Season 17

Inner Circle Kick-off ✨

Last Friday, 153 women showed up for the first SheFi Inner Circle gathering! The collective represented:

→ 6 continents
→ 150+ companies
→ 50+ founders and C-suite execs, plus VPs, directors, and heads of department
→ The majority already building in crypto, finance, tech, and AI

I started SheFi so women could find a community for exploring frontier technologies. The Inner Circle was my bet that professional women want to get to the next level with their peers. Who know that getting to where we want to go can’t be done alone. Who know that it is in giving that we receive.

Friday I watched 153 of them prove it by showing up.

This is the room. I'm so proud of who's in it.

If you're looking to join us later this year, apply to the Inner Circle now.

My Favorite AI Tool This Week 💡

This past week, layoffs flooded the timeline. Students were protesting college graduation speeches. AI doomerism felt like it was at an all-time high. It is hard to look at your feed right now and not feel a bit fatalistic.

But then Pope Leo XIV dropped an encyclical on artificial intelligence called Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), and it provided the exact counter-narrative the internet needed.

It's a massive text, and it's hard to pick the parts that resonated the most, but here's what was salient for me: your humanity is completely irreplaceable, and we must defend each other's humanity in the face of AI.

Other quick takeaways that are worth reflecting on:

1. You are an end, not a means. The text reminds us that corporate restructuring and the pursuit of profits can never justify systematically sacrificing people. AI can simulate language and optimize a spreadsheet, but it has no conscience, no empathy, and no soul. Your worth is not an adjustable line item.

2. Technology reflects whoever builds it. We treat AI like an autonomous, unstoppable tidal wave. But the text reminds us it is "never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it." It will only ever reflect the intentions of the people steering it.

3. Defend your own field. You don't have to fix the global tech crisis. The text actually quotes J.R.R. Tolkien to remind us to focus exactly on what's right in front of us:

A reminder for your week: your humanity matters. In a world rushing to automate absolutely everything, the most important thing you can do is lean into your empathy, your ethics, and your loyalty to the peers standing right next to you.

Read Magnifica Humanitas

Crypto + AI Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

Crypto Roundup.

• Coinbase launched a platform that lets any business create its own branded stablecoin backed by USDC. Flipcash was first out with USDF on Solana. White-label money: Coinbase provides the infrastructure, Circle provides the backing, you slap your brand on top. Honestly thinking about launching SheFi’s USDSHE.

• Eight senior Ethereum Foundation researchers left in 2026, five in May alone. The new leadership published a CROPS mandate (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security) and reportedly asked staff to sign or resign. Former EF researcher Dankrad Feist proposed a new $1B+ organization with one job: make ETH price go up. Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams: "We need an org that wants ETH the asset to win. The EF is not that, never will be." Vitalik responded yesterday saying the EF will choose "longevity over breadth," sell less ETH, and stay focused on CROPS. The EF holds 0.16% of all ETH.

• Trump publicly backed CFTC Chair Michael Selig's push for exclusive authority over prediction markets, calling it "critically important." Selig has sued five states (Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, New York) arguing the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction over platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. States say they're violating local gambling laws. A New York Times investigation found career CFTC officials who raised concerns about Polymarket, Crypto.com, and other firms with Trump family business ties were pushed out of the agency.

AI Roundup.

• Erin Brockovich launched brockovichdatacenter.com — a crowdsourced map of AI data centers across the US. Within one week: 2,700+ reports from 47 states covering water use, utility bill spikes, 24/7 noise, and e-waste. Large data centers consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day — equal to a town of 10,000-50,000 people.

• Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," focused entirely on AI. Signed on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers' rights during the first industrial revolution. Leo XIV framed AI as "another industrial revolution." Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at the Vatican presentation.

• Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses after token-based billing made costs untenable — even for Microsoft. Engineers across Windows, 365, Outlook, Teams, and Surface must switch to GitHub Copilot CLI by June 30. Uber deployed Claude Code to 5,000 engineers, watched usage hit 84-95%, and burned through its entire $3.4B 2026 AI budget in four months. Per-engineer costs: $500-$2,000/month. GitHub is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing starting June 1. US AI software prices are up 20-37%. The forecast was wrong because token consumption behaves nothing like the licenses and seats that finance teams know how to model.

The SheFi takeaway: The Pope wrote his first encyclical about AI. Erin Brockovich crowdsourced 2,700 data center complaints in a week. Microsoft and Uber blew through their AI budgets in months. The questions aren't coming from skeptics anymore — they're coming from the Vatican, from environmental activists with track records, and from the companies building the tools themselves. AI shipped fast. Now everyone's asking what it actually costs — in water, in money, in jobs, in the things that don't show up on a balance sheet.

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.

06/01 NYC: HerChain: Women shaping blockchain in NYC: RSVP here

Join a cross-sector panel of women for an evening of high-impact conversations and unique perspectives on blockchain in New York City.

06/15 Berlin: SheFi Berlin: Cute Canal Coffee at Berlin Blockchain Week: RSVP here

SheFi Berlin is hosting a cute canal coffee meetup for the community to kick off Berlin Blockchain Week.

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

Crypto Events 🌎

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

• 05/28 Boston: InTheRoom: Founders, Builders & Connectors - #BosTechWeek: RSVP here

• 06/02 NYC: Cayman in the City: RSVP here

• 06/02-03 Paris: Proof of Talk: RSVP here

• 06/04 Paris: Scaling Blockchain for Public Good by United Nations Development Programme and SciencesPo: RSVP here

• 06/04 NYC: InTheRoom: From Match to Meeting- #NYTechWeek: RSVP here

• 06/04 Besiktas: Sui TR Community: Sunset Cruise Istanbul V2: RSVP here

• 06/04 NYC: Solana Career Day NYC: RSVP here

• 06/05 NYC: Too Young to Lead? How to Win in Tech Anyway - #NYTechWeek: RSVP here

• 06/13 Berlin: Solana Summit Germany: RSVP here

• 06/26-27 Lisbon: PWN Global Summit 2026: RSVP here

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

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