Agoric’s Iulia Mihailescu Is Here to Remind Us That Geography Affects Perceptions of Blockchain
Where we reside in the world impacts our understanding of cryptocurrency
Growing up in Romania, Iulia Mihailescu saw first hand how financial systems, the economy and government work — or don’t — together. In 1997 and 1998, the former head of go-to-market and marketing for consumer financial services and crypto at PayPal witnessed the devastating Russian financial crisis and experienced the period of “wild capitalism” in Eastern Europe that followed the fall of communism.
“No rules were in place,” Mihailescu—now vice president of marketing at Agoric, the orchestration layer blockchain—said to me in a recent interview. “People joke about crypto being the wild wild west now, but they should have seen Eastern Europe in the 90’s.”
Like other self-described “good Romanians,” Mihailescu took four years of intensive algorithmics and informatics in high school before deciding that wasn’t her path. But her education allowed her to appreciate technology’s ability to bring glimpses of progress to any society, and she went on to study international politics and business.
After finishing with school, Mihailescu became an entrepreneur in Romania and started her own web agency before joining Google in 2008. But three weeks after she joined, the company froze hiring during the Lehman Brothers collapse—the beginning of the subprime crisis that shook the global economy.
“Different geographies create different outlooks on crypto. Although we’re in this industry like a global tribe, the way each person views crypto is very much determined by the economic needs and history of where they reside.”
“Back then I was in Ireland, and after a few months at Google, Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper started to circulate around the Internet,” Mihailescu said.
But Mihailescu wasn’t interested in the technicalities within the paper: She was witnessing Ireland become one of the hardest hit countries in the European Union and could foresee how blockchain could have an immense social impact worldwide.
“It was also the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests,” Mihailescu said. “I told myself the audacity of the ideas in the whitepaper and the concept of cryptocurrency as an alternative to fiat was so strong that it would definitely create more than a culture of movement—it would create a massive revolution.”
She flagged crypto as a trend for the future. In 2019, after being at PayPal for about five years, she was working for the company in Paris as head of consumer segment, where she first encountered crypto on the company’s product roadmap.
“I was basically in charge of looking ahead, three to five years down the road, and identifying consumer trends,” Mihailescu said. “That’s when crypto became one of the top three priorities for my region.”
But when Mihailescu relocated to the United States the following year to work at PayPal’s global headquarters in San Jose, she was surprised to learn her enthusiasm for bringing crypto to the market was not shared by everyone on the team.
“Things used to be very ‘top-down’ at PayPal, and they wouldn’t create a product just because they could,” Mihailescu said. “The crypto request came from my work in Europe, and while I wasn’t the only one requesting it, people from different geographies had different reasons for the request because different geographies create different outlooks on crypto. Although we’re in this industry like a global tribe, the way each person views crypto is very much determined by the economic needs and history of where they reside.”
Mihailescu’s worldview provided her with a well-rounded understanding of the ways in which blockchain technology could benefit society—ways her American counterparts at the time may have missed given the stigma surrounding blockchain in the U.S.
“My view of cryptocurrency was formed by my personal experiences and European identity,” Mihailescu said. “Whereas my view of blockchain came from being in the fintech world, working at a technology company and understanding blockchain as technology separated from the use cases it enables.”
This understanding partly inspired Mihailescu to write her book, Trustless: Strategy Lessons from the Web3 Era, in the spring of 2023 during the peak of the crypto winter.
“I was involved with some consulting at the time and could see that 80 percent of the requests were coming from traditional finance companies,” Mihailescu said. “Around that time, the 2023 banking crisis happened and I had a fear that the industry might choke and might potentially disappear. I wrote the book so that my background and insights coming from marketing and go-to-market strategy within the crypto industry wouldn’t be wasted.”
The industry, of course, endured, and Mihailescu ended up joining Agoric in May 2024. As vice president of marketing, Mihailescu is responsible for ensuring competitive brand positioning, increasing crypto adoption and working with investor relations.
“We were just coming out of the crypto winter—and anyone who’s witnessed the history of the past two years beyond the crashes knows to choose a crypto project based on the team and the value-fit with that team,” Mihailescu said. “You don’t choose a technology, you choose a team, and the team at Agoric was exceptional.”