How Alejandra Corbella Built a 40,000-Strong Women-in-Crypto Community

When Alejandra Corbella started working in crypto in 2020, as a bilingual journalist covering Bitcoin, payments and remittances, she was often the only woman in the room. “It just felt like a really lonely time to be a woman in crypto,” she says. The data backs her up. A 2023 study by Boston Consulting Group and People of Crypto Lab found that 87% of web3 startups had all-male founding teams, and a 2024 Gemini survey of adults in five countries, including Singapore, found that women made up just 31% of crypto owners, down from 42% two years earlier.

The turning point came on Clubhouse, the audio app that boomed during the pandemic. After Corbella asked a question in a room full of Bitcoin maximalists, the moderator told her, “We don’t say crypto over here,” and banned her. She told Ashley Wright, a crypto educator she had found through an Instagram search for “women in crypto,” that they should start their own: “Instead of hanging out in other people’s rooms, we just make our own.” They called it Crypto Babes, made it “all pink, because we wanted it to look feminine,” and built it as a place where women could learn “without feeling like they didn’t belong .”

Over the following years, Crypto Babes grew to a combined reach of about 40,000 people across Clubhouse, X, Telegram, Discord, email and in-person events. She and Wright co-led it through 2024, with sponsors including Harmony, NEAR and Polkadot and a partnership with the Bitcoin Conference, and it continues today as FemTech. It also launched Corbella’s career as a Bay Area marketing and community strategist in crypto, blockchain and AI.

From audio rooms to a real room
Clubhouse’s moment didn’t last. The app passed 10 million users in February 2021, but its audience thinned as lockdowns eased and Twitter launched Spaces. “We’re not really getting views on Clubhouse because everyone’s moving into Twitter Spaces,” Corbella recalls. The answer was to meet in person.

In March 2022, Corbella posted a grant proposal on Harmony’s community forum for a workshop and side event during Bitcoin 2022 in Miami, a conference that drew more than 35,000 people. The pitch was to bring women from tech and finance into web3. Harmony approved a $3,500 grant, Alloy and NEAR joined as sponsors, and, according to Corbella, total funding passed $20,000, about twice her budget.

Demand outran the space. The venue held about 200 people, and Corbella says more than 1,000 signed up. Harmony’s post-event report counted over 200 attendees, more than 70% of them women.

The sponsor money let Corbella keep the event free. “We didn’t want to charge people, even though we could have charged,” she says. “We didn’t want to make it where people couldn’t afford to come.”

The business side of belonging
The co-founders divided the work by strength. Wright, a crypto educator with a background in banking and finance, led on social media and public speaking. Corbella led sponsorships and partnerships. “A lot of my work was, ‘How can we get more partners? How can we secure more sponsorships? How can we make money?'” she says. As co-founder, she also made the main decisions on the events calendar, budget and partnerships.

The timing worked in their favor. In the 2021–22 cycle, layer-1 blockchains were competing hard for users and developers; NEAR alone announced an $800 million ecosystem fund in October 2021. Crypto Babes gave them a direct line to women, an audience most of them were struggling to reach. As the lead on sponsorships, Corbella raised more than $70,000 in a single year, she says, money that paid for events and the team.

What women actually came for
The founders assumed members wanted education and, above all, a chance to meet other women. They did. But Corbella saw another pattern: many members were looking for jobs, and many others were hiring.

“It was many women that say, ‘Hey, I just joined a company and we’re hiring,’ or ‘We’re looking for more women to bring into our team,'” she says. “At the beginning I didn’t see that vision. I just thought it’s a community where we’re educating people, but it became a funnel for business. It became a funnel for sales. It became a funnel for jobs.”

Crypto Babes added a job board and regular emails listing open roles. Its programming changed as members became more experienced, moving from introductory Zoom workshops on DeFi and NFTs to talks by cryptographers and heads of business.

Smaller rooms, stronger signals
Since then, Corbella has produced more than 200 events, leading marketing, community and events programs for Tools for Humanity (the company behind Worldcoin), the Sui Foundation, NEAR and Aleo. She now works in ecosystem development at 0G Labs, a company building AI infrastructure on blockchain, where she curates invite-only founder and AI events. She also hosts founder meetups at Frontier Tower, a 16-story San Francisco building that houses AI, crypto and deep-tech communities.

Her focus has moved from bigger rooms to better ones. “When I first started doing events, I just wanted to get as many people in the room,” she says. Now she builds events around specific audiences, such as developers or go-to-market teams. “I think curation became more about the crowd and bringing the right kinds of people.”

That approach runs against much of the industry. Around Token2049 in Singapore in 2025, organizers promoted about 1,000 side events across the city. It was the same conference side-event format Crypto Babes used in Miami, now at a scale where attendance alone says little.
Corbella judges an event by what people do. “The event ends at nine. How many people did you have to try to kick out at nine, right?” she says. She also tracks how many guests come back without an invite, and whether they bring friends or introduce each other. “That’s how I know there’s real momentum, where people just come, and then bring their friends.”

She has seen this in her own career. When she moved from Sui to World, some regulars followed her. She remembers one telling her, “Doesn’t matter which company you work for, I’m still gonna come to your events.”

She thinks AI could use the same playbook. Crypto, she says, “is very good at creating communities before even the technology exists,” with volunteers who organized events and made content because they cared about it. By comparison, “AI still feels kind of gated for normies.”

The people who remember
A few months ago, at an AI event, the woman sitting next to Corbella asked if she was Alejandra. She had been at a 2022 Crypto Babes meetup by the pool at Corbella’s apartment complex in San Jose, and has since moved from crypto into a job at a major AI company.

Corbella says this has happened more than ten times: someone remembers her early Clubhouse rooms, or an event from three or four years earlier.

“People might forget faces, but they won’t forget the feeling and how we make them feel,” she says. “There are a lot of spaces that feel very gated. Unless you went to Stanford or you came from YC, you probably won’t feel welcome at a lot of these places.” She wants people to leave her rooms feeling: “This is an opportunity for me to learn. An opportunity for me to get tapped in without being judged.”

Six years after being banned from someone else’s room, the only people she asks to leave are the ones still talking at nine.