Hey, thank you so much for having me. My name is Maria. I'm one of the investment partners at an early stage VC focused or crypto focused VC firm called electric capital. So we only invest in crypto and we started in 2018. How I first got into the space.
started paying real attention. I heard about Bitcoin in 2013, was the earliest I started looking at it. I started exploring the space a lot more seriously in 2016. And that was because I understood Bitcoin
I thought it was interesting, but then once Ethereum launched and we had this ability to kind of write code and enable applications on top of blockchain, that became a lot more interesting to me, especially since I have been engineering and computer science background
as well. And 2016 I started exploring this concept of what can you enable if you can do a lot of financial transactions on chain. So obviously cross-border payments is a huge part of it. But more than that,
If you had smart contracts, you can easily do things like escrow on top of cross-border payments, which is not a trivial thing to do through the traditional financial stack. So that's the lens through which I first started looking at crypto and then joined full-time in 2018.