Faces of Web3: Paulina Tylus Building a Career in Web3

Key takeaways

• Paulina built her first Web3 client base at a single conference in Poland in 2023, with no prior crypto industry experience.
• SheFi’s eight-week programme was the turning point that shaped her technical understanding of the space.
• Through her work at Zodia Markets, she has gained a front-row seat to institutional adoption, with the firm processing over $113 billion in stablecoin volume in 2025.
• Women bring collaborative culture and emotional honesty to Web3 – two things the industry genuinely needs.
• Her advice: ignore the noise on X and look for projects with real product-market fit underneath it.
  

Paula came to Web3 with a resume that resists easy categorisation. Biotech, luxury real estate marketing, traditional finance, and life across Singapore, Denmark, and Poland all fed into the same recurring instinct: that decentralised systems were worth betting on. In 2023, she stopped watching from the sidelines and acted on it.

She turned up at a conference in Poland with a simple pitch for Web3 companies in an area she noticed was lacking, social media content and conference representation. It worked and she left with clients, started travelling to more events, grew her presence, and eventually joined SheFi for their full eight-week programme. From there she built steadily, leading Women of Web3 panels and taking on broader work across the space, until Zodia Markets brought her in for a global partnerships and client management role. Zodia is a stablecoin brokerage that handled over $113 billion in institutional volume in 2025.

How Did You Start in Web3

I started investing about four years ago through Revolut, the easy, normie way. Quickly I became very interested and the idea of decentralisation genuinely resonated with me. It was a radical change from what I was doing at the time, running a marketing agency for luxury real estate clients, with earlier stints in biotech and tech due diligence working closely with traditional finance, but something kept pulling me back to Web3.

In 2023 I went to my first conference in Poland, which I discovered online, and I just bought a ticket, and turned up. My pitch was straightforward: social media content and conference representation for Web3 companies, getting them leads and making content from live events.

People were open to it and I got clients and that is when I started travelling to more conferences, growing my network, and then I met Dayana Aleksandrova, from WalletConnect, who introduced me to the crypto and Web3 educational organisation, SheFi.

I completed the full eight-week course and came out completely convinced about the different possibilities. From there I grew into leading panels, working with more companies, and eventually joining Zodia Markets.

What Motivated You to Work in Web3

I genuinely believed, and still do, that this technology carries possibilities we haven’t come close to using yet. There’s a whole blue ocean here, and I could see more people beginning to recognise it.

I wanted to be part of building it rather than watching from the outside. It was idealism and opportunity together, and I have no regrets.

What Have Been Your Web3 Career Highlights

SheFi was genuinely transformative. I put real effort into that eight-week course, completed the practical lessons Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi, built, and took the time to actually understand what I was learning.

That educational investment changed everything for me.

Professionally, the moment that stands out most is going from pitching at my first conference in Poland to leading a Women of Web3 panel at the same event the following year.

That felt like a genuine full-circle moment.

Building at Zodia Markets has been the most commercially meaningful chapter so far, working on institutional partnerships across stablecoins, tokenisation, and real-world assets.

What’s In Store For You and Zodia Markets In 2026?

In our view we see the next phase of institutional adoption being driven by practical business benefits: moving capital faster, improving liquidity management, and reducing the operational costs associated with cross-border value transfer and settlement.

We’re expanding access to tokenized treasury and money market products, giving institutions new ways to deploy and manage idle cash while maintaining the flexibility and efficiency that digital asset infrastructure can offer.

At the same time, we’re seeing growing interest from corporate treasuries exploring how digital assets can fit into broader treasury and liquidity strategies.

We’re also enabling services such as third-party settlement, allowing clients to deliver digital assets directly to their counterparties without having to build and maintain their own wallet and settlement infrastructure.

Our role is to help institutions access digital asset markets through infrastructure that is secure, efficient, and built for institutional scale.

What Is Web3

When I was first learning, I explained it the way most people do: Web3 is the third iteration of the internet. Web2 was social media and centralised platforms; Web3 is decentralised media, decentralised connection, and the rails that let you actually own things online.

What I’ve come to believe more strongly is that ownership is the real differentiator.

In Web2, platforms own your data and monetise it without you.

In Web3, you can own your content, your tokens, your digital identity.

That shift is what matters.

I’m still bullish on decentralised media as a concept, even though adoption has moved more slowly than I hoped. What drives that conviction is wanting media outlets free from single ownership, and information that governments and corporations can’t control.

What Are Societal Opportunities Web3 brings

The opportunity is a more open, collaborative model for how we interact, transact, and access information. Financial inclusion is a significant part of that, giving people access to value transfer and financial systems without requiring a traditional bank account.

Personally, the deeper opportunity is cultural.

Web3 at its best models a way of doing things that’s collaborative rather than competitive, and open rather than gatekept.

Women entering this space are a meaningful part of turning that from a talking point into something real.

What Are Challenges the Web3 Community Faces

Wider adoption is still the hardest problem, and the industry remains intimidating for outsiders.

There’s a lot of noise, a lot of jargon, and many people who make it sound more complicated than it is, sometimes deliberately.

For example, decentralised social media (DeSoc) has a long way to go. A year ago I was very bullish on it, and my enthusiasm has come down since, not because the idea is flawed, but because the user experience isn’t there yet.

People won’t leave Instagram and TikTok unless something is meaningfully easier and better. 

Women in Web3

What Are Benefits For Women in Web3?

We bring balance, and we bring the connective tissue between the highly specialised technical side of the industry and the wider world that needs to actually use what gets built.

Women are users too, representing half the world’s population and half its buying power, and our presence in the room changes what gets built and how it gets built.

Women also bring something the space genuinely needs: the willingness to be vulnerable and to show that not knowing everything is fine.

Saying “I’m overwhelmed” or “I don’t understand this yet” is a strength, not a weakness.

That honesty is helping shift the culture toward something more collaborative, more sustainable, and more human.

Why Should Women Join Web3?

I’ve never felt as supported by a female community as I have in this space, and that genuinely surprised me. There were moments of real doubt in my journey, times I nearly walked away and the women around me kept me going.

They encouraged me, stayed alongside me, challenged my thinking, and showed me what was possible and I want more women to have that same experience.

More women in the room means better collective decisions and more inclusive products.

What Is Your Top Advice for Women Entering Web3

• Don’t let what you see on X or in the media put you off as that’s a very small, very loud part of the industry.
  
• Sustainable projects with real product-market fit and genuine growth potential exist, they just don’t make the most noise.
  
• The people who make this space sound impossibly hard to understand often don’t understand it as well as they appear to.
  
• Ask questions, stay curious, and you’ll see through the performance very quickly.
  

After starting with just a pinch of curiosity, Paulina has shown that starting in Web3 with a conference ticket, a simple pitch, and a genuine belief that the technology is worth it!

Three years later she’s managing institutional partnerships at one of the space’s largest stablecoin brokerages, supporting and encouraging others, and still as convinced as she was on day one that this is the way to make a last change in the world.

That combination of Paulina’s conviction and follow-through is exactly what the industry needs more of.

Thank you, Paulina Tylus, for taking the time to share her experience with us at Take3. Find Paulina at Zodia Markets: LinkedIn • X  Twitter • Zodia Markets

If this story resonated with you, explore more voices from our Faces of Web3 series and get in touch at Take3 Contact to share your story.