Galia Benartzi | Co-Founder of Bancor
Blockchain and crypto Industry is not just a boy’s club, with innumerable cryptofemmes paving the way. One such notable personality and inspirational powerhouse leader is “Galia Benartzi“. Featured in Forbes “Five Female Rock Stars Leading the Crypto Scene” in 2018, Galia was recently selected as the final 10 winners of WireX’s 2021 ‘Rising Women in Crypto Power List’.
Galia Benartzi is known as a serial technology entrepreneur for her successful startups “Mytopia”, “Particle Code” and now “Bancor”. She knows ins-and-outs of venture capital financing and is amongst the few blockchain influencers who holds a deeper understanding of fintech (finance technology). Let’s learn more about the charismatic femfluencer, from her education, professional career journey, net worth to future plans.
Name | Galia Benartzi |
Known For | Co-Founder of Bancor |
Age | 42 Years |
Citizenship | Israel |
Current Residence | Tel Aviv, Israel |
Net Worth | $200 million |
galiabenartzi |
Galia Benartzi grew up in Silicon Valley, California bay area to Israeli immigrant parents. Her father was an engineer and she has a younger brother named “Guy Benartzi”. She currently lives in Israel and spend her time between “Tel Aviv” and Zug, Switzerland, where the Bancor Foundation is based.
Galia completed her graduation in “comparative literature” (Hebrew and politics) from Dartmouth College, Hanover, United States and her master’s in “international relations and economics (with a focus on energy)” from Johns Hopkins University SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies).
She co-founded “Mytopia” – social games development studio, with her brother “Guy”, just two year after she graduated from Dartmouth. She sold the Palo Alto based company and 12 games under the same to 888 in June 2010 for base price of $18 million cash and at $48 million net capped.
In July 2010, she co-founded “Particle Code Inc.”, a HTML5 cross-platform development environment, which received a “DEMOgod award” at DEMO Fall 2010 and was selected as “Top Ten Mobile Startup“ by Laptop Magazine in 2011. She sold the company to “Appcelerator” in October 2011 for an undisclosed amount.
After Particle Code Inc., Galia worked as an “entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR)” at Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California. She then joined “Founders Fund”, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm of PayPal co-founder “Peter Thiel”, as a “Venture Partner”.
In summer of 2016, she co-founded “Bancor”, with her brother “Guy Benartzi”, Eyal Hertzog, and Yudi Levi. Bancor is a “blockchain protocol” that allows users to launch buy & sell different ERC20 tokens directly and operate it independently of a third party exchange like “Coinbase”. Bancor Network Token (BNT) is a virtual reserve currency token of Bancor and was released on June 12, 2017.
The cryptocurrency conversion company has chosen the name “Bancor” as a homage to economist John Maynard Keynes and E. F. Schumacher, who conceptualized a supranational currency “Bancor” in the years 1940–1942, to describe a future global reserve currency.
Galia Benartzi gave a TEDTalk on “The Value Revolution: How Blockchain Will Change Money & the World” at TEDxWhiteCity in Tel Aviv on Jan. 25, 2017.
Galia is also a committed community builder. Her start-up before Bancor called “Appcoin” launched a community currency pilot for a Facebook group of local mothers in Tel Aviv. Before it’s failure, The “Hearts” currency tokens The “Hearts” tokens was used by over 40K women users, who traded $24 million worth of commerce.
In June 2018, aimed at combating poverty, Bancor launched the world’s first “natively liquid community currency” for under-served communities across Kenya. In Partnership with NGO “grassroot economics”, the Bancor “smart token” currency, expanded Grassroots’ existing paper currency system into Bancor network.
Galia Benartzi was also appointed as one of the 14 mentors at UNICEF Innovation fund’s 1st Blockchain cohort in New York, held on 19 January 2019. As a mentor she guided and provided one-to-one mentoring to 6 blockchain based start-ups: Atix Labs (Argentina), OS City (Mexico), Utopixar (Tunisia), StaTwig (India), Prescrypto (Mexico), and W3 Engineers (Bangladesh).