A wide ranging conversation about Eva's path from Toronto and management consulting into crypto, and how that journey changed alongside the industry itself. Eva shares how early experimentation, burnout and a growing sense of realism shaped both her career decisions and her view of the space.
Key topics:
- Eva shares her background as a first generation Canadian raised in Toronto by Russian immigrant parents who were both engineers.
In college, she studied economics, global economics, and Spanish, with interests in languages, global affairs, and how markets connect across borders.
- She explains why management consulting felt like the right first job: problem solving, exposure to businesses, and the chance to work across finance, technology, and operations.
- Her shift into crypto started through her brother, Mark Baylin, and accelerated when Ethereum clicked as a better payment rail than the patchwork systems she was seeing in consulting.
- She reflects on the early crypto era as a time of intense experimentation, especially around DAOs, community driven models, and more idealistic visions of coordination.
- How the industry has matured into a more capitalist and realistic phase, with less romance and more focus on what actually works in practice.
- Navigating a highly technical ecosystem without being a developer by leaning on her business background, learning quickly, and staying close to the technology.
- Why crypto projects need business, marketing, and sales people early, not just engineers, and why technical proficiency is often overestimated.
- On why she left the Graph after five and a half years: burnout, changing personal energy, and the project’s own evolution into a more mature infrastructure layer.
- Burnout and boundary setting come up as a major theme, including practical changes like removing Discord and Slack from her phone.
Eva discusses how crypto’s always on culture is slowly running into more human constraints, including the practical pull of nine to five workflows.
- Her longtime art practice, how NFTs briefly gave hobby artists a venue to sell work, and why her view of NFTs has become much more skeptical.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro to Eva and the Human Protocol focus on the people behind crypto
01:49 - Growing up in Toronto as a first generation immigrant with global interests
03:48 - Why management consulting felt like the safest and most interesting first career
06:02 - How Eva first understood blockchain through her brother and payments work
07:32 - The Bitcoin growth shock that made crypto impossible to ignore
08:58 - Taking a sabbatical, then leaving consulting with no clear plan
09:35 - Moving to Bangkok and joining OmiseGo
10:48 - Volunteering at ETH Denver 2018 and finding her people
12:58 - Why the cozy early crypto culture changed as the space matured
14:20 - DAOs, experimentation, and the cost of early idealism
17:36 - Whether humans are actually wired to coordinate through blockchain systems
18:22 - Why trustless systems still depend on human incentives and realistic design
20:49 - Why Eva is glad the industry is moving past repeated experiments
22:43 - How crypto changed her political and economic worldview
25:14 - Growing up with the industry as the average participant aged and matured
27:07 - Being non technical in a technical space and building authority anyway
30:11 - Why business and communication skills are essential in crypto
34:46 - How the Graph matured from crypto native ambition into enterprise reality
37:02 - Why she joined the Graph in the first place
38:44 - The moment she realized it was time to leave the Graph
41:41 - Burnout, Discord overload, and removing work apps from her phone
43:17 - Why crypto is slowly becoming more nine to five in practice
46:10 - Autonomy, remote work, and the need for stronger boundaries
48:51 - Eva’s art practice and how NFTs opened a selling path for hobby artists
52:13 - Why her view of NFTs became much more bearish over time
54:57 - What she would do differently: less indexing on meme driven chains and dapps
58:08 - How leaving a role changed the way she uses Twitter
61:34 - Figuring out her next mission and role in crypto
62:18 - Why she finds much of the RWA narrative boring
64:55 - Why zero knowledge proofs feel like the most exciting technical frontier
66:29 - Crypto as an expander of the financial system
67:16 - What Eva expects from the next cycle and why she is optimistic