Women in Web3: Using the Law to Shape the Future of Web3 Policy

Rebecca Rettig started her law career with a more traditional career trajectory. Her first job was at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, one of the most prestigious law firms in the United States.

She first came into contact with the legal complications around peer-to-peer technology when she was working on a case on Limewire, a file-sharing platform that let users download and upload files through a desktop, but she didn’t really look into the space until many years later when she was on a train ride to work.

“I read an article about Bitcoin and Mt. Gox in the Wall Street Journal and thought – there’s really going to be legal implications to this,” Rettig told The Org.

She decided to take a leap of faith and left her job to focus on advising clients on legal and regulatory matters in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. She worked with clients such as Compound Labs, an open-source software development company building tools, products and services for the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem and during the process became well acquainted with other lawyers in the space.

Eventually, she was approached by Aave, a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol, where she now serves as its General Counsel. The Org spoke with Rettig to learn more about her day-to-day life and how she is using her skills to influence policy-making in the still-nascent Web3 space.

The guiding principle

As the Web3 space is still in its infancy, for Rettig, one of the most exciting things about her work at Aave is meeting with policy-makers and regulators in the U.S., U.K. and E.U. to determine what good policies would look like for the space – creating a new precedent for what Web3 is and how it will work in the future.

“The intersection of technology and law is very exciting because innovation keeps pushing forward and laws have to evolve and change in some dramatic way,” she said. “Policymakers understand that the technology is here to stay and the younger generation believes that their digital identity is going to be a very important part of how they interact with the world, so there is a lot of interest in understanding what the technology does.”

When it comes to determining what a good policy is for Web3, Rettig has one guiding principle that she follows:

“I ask myself, what is the law actually trying to accomplish, and how can we accomplish that in a Web3 native kind of way,” she said.

Despite this, she says that one of the biggest challenges when it comes to working with policymakers to determine laws and regulations around Web3 is fundamentally helping them grasp the concept of the Blockchain and decentralized finance.

“It’s very hard to orient people’s brains to how the Blockchain actually works,” she said. “So the grasping of what it does and what the benefits are – is challenging.”

Resources for women

Although Rettig has personally only had very positive experiences as a woman in the Web3 space, she acknowledges that the space is still dominated by men and encourages women who are interested in Web3 law to actively reach out to people who are already in the space.

“Find your people, go to conferences,” she said. “What I did when I first started was just going up to people and starting conversations. Everybody here is so excited about what they’re doing that it’s not awkward at all.”

On top of reading blog posts, listening to podcasts and actively keeping up with Crypto Twitter, Rettig also recommends that people interested in the policy space in Web3 need to interact with the actual software they are hoping to regulate.

“Use the technology, that is the most important thing,” she said. “You need to understand the tools in order to create good policies around it.”