Inside Des Femmes, the Magazine DAO Empowering Women in Tech

Does the future of media companies lie in decentralized models?

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“Even successful magazines right now are rethinking their model… One of the ways you give power to your readers is to give them the direct ability to allocate funds.”

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Former CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen joins Anna Baydakova and Ben Schiller on “Opinionated” to discuss Des Femmes, the magazine for women in finance and tech. Cuen co-founded the magazine to address a lack of representation and voice for women entrepreneurs, especially in the crypto industry.

Des Femmes is printed and managed by a DAO-inspired structure. Cuen discusses Des Femmes’ decision to pursue a bitcoin multisig structure to manage the funds the publication generated from an Ethereum crowdfunding campaign, and its plans for further decentralization in the future. Converting a media organization into a decentralized autonomous organization presents unique opportunities to get the community more involved in the co-creation of the publication.

This episode was produced, announced and edited by Michele Musso with additional production support from Eleanor Pahl. Our theme song is by Elision.

HOSTS

Dan Ilett

Dan Ilett writes on tech, money and energy. He advises business on digital strategy and technology messaging for large deals. He is founder of Erbut - an advisory company - and Greenbang - a smart technology research company.

Anna Baydakova

Anna writes about blockchain projects and regulation with a special focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. She is especially excited about stories on privacy, cybercrime, sanctions policies and censorship resistance of decentralized technologies.
She graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University and the Higher School of Economics in Russia and got her Master's degree at Columbia Journalism School in New York City.
She joined CoinDesk after years of writing for various Russian media, including the leading political outlet Novaya Gazeta.
Anna owns BTC and an NFT of sentimental value.

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Benjamin Schiller

Benjamin Schiller is CoinDesk's managing editor for features and opinion. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at BREAKER Magazine and a staff writer at Fast Company. He holds some ETH, BTC and LINK.

Danny Bradbury

Danny Bradbury has been a professional writer since 1989, and has worked freelance since 1994. He covers technology for publications such as the Guardian.

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