The Doxxed Face of a Pseudonymous Investment Project

Eva Beylin is one of three doxxed members of the influential Web3 venture capital fund eGirl Capital. In that sense, somewhat ironically, she’s often the person most associated with the mostly pseudonymous, largely informal project.

Founded by 14 acquaintances in a Telegram channel in 2019, eGirl Capital members are unknown even to each other. Beylin says she has yet to meet most of her eGirl co-investors. She doesn’t even know many of their birth names. That’s to say, she knows them as the rest of the world does, as a cartoon cat in a raincoat or King Leonidas with BTC-symbol eyes from the movie “300.”

“It’s challenging to build up a reputation,” Beylin said about her peers in a 2021 interview. Crypto takes its embrace of pseudonymity as a point of pride. If money is going digital, why wouldn’t personalities?

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Over the years, eGirl has become one of the most closely watched investment collectives. Its thesis is investing in core infrastructure that may only be useful in the future, like Ethereum layer 2s or “DeFi primitives,” Beylin said.

This includes supremely exciting technologies such as the primary decentralized ETH staking protocol Lido, the open-storage project Arweave and the innovative blockchain scaling development team behind Zksync.

Beylin, a graduate of Canada's Ivey Business School of the University of Western Ontario, located in London, Ontario, wasn’t trained as a venture capitalist. She got her start out of college doing consulting work for payments and banking companies before being introduced to Ethereum and Crypto Twitter by her brother.

Realizing that crypto solved many of the issues she was passionate about, Beylin jumped into the deep end. She joined OmiseGO, the team behind what is sometimes called Ethereum’s first scaling system, the OMG Network, and has worked with the rollup-friendly Plasma Group.

She also advised MolochDAO, an early experiment with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). Like many early ETH users, Beylin has done a stint with the Ethereum Foundation.

Although not “technically minded,” she said, Beylin has spent most of her time investing in or helping build support around “core crypto technologies.” For the past three years she’s worked for The Graph Foundation, part of the team developing the eponymous protocol.

The Graph aims to become “the Google of Web3” by building out infrastructure to open-source data and make APIs more accessible. This will help developers more easily build dapps (decentralized applications), and provide the world with indexed blockchain information.

As director of the The Graph foundation, Beylin has helped disperse over $135 million in grants to community members and developers building on the protocol and helped her team close a $50 million capital raise led by Tiger Global.

Beylin is also both a non-fungible token (NFT) investor and creator who says she spends her free time painting. But if you really want to know what she’s getting herself into, you’ll have to ask her pseudonym.