Chrissy Hill was 16 when her hometown of Ravenel, South Carolina got its first stoplight. She’s risen from those humble beginnings to be a top executive at Polkadot, the blockchain created by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, while continuing to be on the lookout for the newest frontier. 

For Hill, the interim chief operating officer and chief legal officer at Parity Technologies – the open source tech driving the Polkadot blockchain – her journey to web3 was a mixture of happenstance and being eternally curious about emerging tech.

“I cannot say I had a definitive plan except I knew I wanted to set out into the world and look for the frontier of law and regulation because I come from a family of lawyers and magistrates,” Hill said to me in a recent interview. “I love South Carolina and I love America, but I wanted to experience the rest of the world.”

That desire led her across the Atlantic to eventually end up working for Wood, the creator of Polkadot who before that made Vitalik Buterin’s idea for Ethereum a reality with the technical specifications he wrote in what’s known as the Ethereum yellow paper.

Polkadot was recently announced as the official global trading partner for Inter Miam, the Major League Soccer team co-owned by David Beckham where superstar Lionel Messi currently plays. The company also sponsored race car driver Conor Daly, who led for 22 laps at this year’s Indy 500. Mythical Games, home to video games such as Call of Duty, in August migrated from Ethereum to Polkadot. It’s all part of Dot Play—Polkadot’s new entity designed to engage with all facets of entertainment. While Hill has an extensive background in the legal and financial realms, she’s also a curator for Dot Play.

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Hill ventured from Washington, D.C. to London in 2002 and spent 10 years in financial services working for Barclays and Linklaters. She then worked for former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair after he left office, eventually pivoting to the blockchain space in January 2022 to work for Wood.

“I was always looking for what could be exciting in the traditionally dry field of law and regulation,” Hill said. “That’s the golden thread connecting everything I’ve done.”

Read more: The Web3 Foundation, Creators of Polkadot, 'Walking the Walk' Towards Full Decentralization 

It’s a thread that’s kept Hill open to what those exciting opportunities could look like, instead of relegating her path to a confined set of parameters.

“When I was working for Mr. Blair around 2021, I started to hear about web3 and blockchain in the realms of government, voting and healthcare—specifically pertaining to developing nations,” Hill said. “When I was approached for the job at Parity, I had a friend say, ‘This is totally up your alley—nothing’s written in the law yet and you have the opportunity to make sure good regulation is in place to promote innovation.’ So I thought, ‘I’ll go and meet these people.’”

One of those people happened to be Wood, to whom Hill attributes her motivation for moving forward in the web3 space.

“I thought, ‘This is the type of person who I want to be affiliated with,’” she said. “I knew that the regulatory team looking after Dot for the web3 foundation was—and is—led by Josh Klayman of Linklaters, and I was a Linklaters alum. I thought I was fundamentally familiar with how the firm operated, their approach to risk and regulation, and I realized I would have confidence that things were done in a way that would reflect my values as well as my understanding of the law. That’s what drew me to the protocol in addition to the people who I met, who are brilliant.”

But Hill soon discovered that not everyone—especially web3 outsiders—shared the same view of people within the crypto industry.

“I’d gone to an event at the Houses of Parliament here in London and met a lawmaker who I’d previously worked with when I was working with Mr. Blair,” Hill said. “He said to me, ‘Chrissy, why in the world have you joined an industry where they cannot spell HODL or BUIDL the right way?’ I laughed, but then thought—‘Oh crap. Many people are naturally intimidated by technology because they don’t understand it. It can be opaque.’”

Drawing from her finance and political background, Hill realized the importance of using terms and stories about web3 that people could relate to in order to build the trust and understanding that drives adoption. Otherwise, acronyms like “GM” and “IRL” can have an adverse effect and actually prove to be more exclusionary than inclusionary.

“It’s about understanding who your audience is,” Hill said. “I’ll have a different way of communicating a message to an engineer than I will to a legal or finance function.”

She said engaging with the Polkadot community is vital to know what they care about and what they are building. 

“That way, you can be proactive from a regulatory perspective, not just reactive,” Hill said. “If I’m sitting with the founders and know what they want to build next and where they want to go with their products, I can set up a ‘healthy eating plan’ from a legal and regulatory perspective—taking steps from the outset to make sure they’re set up to deal with taxes, staffing, DAOs and tokenomics.”

It all comes down to trust, she said. 

“We can’t be in developers’ heads when they’re coding, but if they’re aware of the issues and know the direction of travel on particular points, they can come to us if they have questions,” Hill said. “Establishing that trust—where if they do come to us with questions—they’ll know we’re going to be partners and help pave the way so that whatever they want to create will be adopted by as many people as possible. That’s a hugely successful relationship.”

lead image: Chrissy Hill