Molly White

Molly Allen White (born 1993) is an American software engineer, crypto skeptic, and Wikipedia editor. A critic of the decentralized blockchain (Web3) and cryptocurrency industries, she runs the website Web3 Is Going Just Great and a newsletter, both of which document wrongdoing in that technology space. White has appeared in Web3-related news and consulted on federal legislation for regulating the crypto industry. White is among Wikipedia's most active women editors. She has contributed to a range of articles in the encyclopedia, particularly on right-wing extremism, and in 2022 successfully proposed that the Wikimedia Foundation cease to collect crypto donations.

Wikipedia editing White began editing Wikipedia at the age of 13, and became a site administrator while still in high school. Initially, White contributed to articles about her favorite emo bands and women scientists, but she began contributing to articles about right-wing extremismsuch as Gamergate, the Boogaloo movement, Gab, Parler, and Jacob Wohlduring the first Donald Trump administration. She received mainstream news coverage for her work editing the article about the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Under the username "GorillaWarfare", by early 2022, she had made more than 100,000 edits. She has said that this work fulfills her interest in validating information online and her belief that spreading information produces societal change. She served six years on the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, which adjudicates editor disputes.

White has been a regular target of online harassment, threats of violence, doxxing, and hounding both on Wikipedia and off-site. Her experience was the subject of a 2016 speech on editor harassment by Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher. White had previously been targeted after her photograph was featured in a Foundation fundraising campaign. The harassment escalated in 2018 after she began editing Wikipedia articles on incels and other contentious topics.

Cryptocurrency criticism My overwhelming feeling is that Web3 projects seem to be a solution in search of a problem. — Molly White — May 2022 Many of the site's stories are not covered in the mainstream press, and unlike press coverage of Web3, its headlines are unsensational. The Verge described her writing as "dryly funny, almost clinical" in its documentation. A running total of dollars lost to crypto failures runs in the website's corner. The site also includes a glossary of jargon, curated resources about the blockchain, and an annotated critique of Kevin Roose's New York Times article, "The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto",

By mid-2022, White was known among the most prominent and knowledgeable critics of the crypto and Web3 industries. On those topics, White lectured at Stanford University, counseled U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on legislation, and provided fact checks for inquiring journalists. According to The Information, her appearances on Web3-related news sites, podcasts, and technology mailing lists garnered her identification as, an "unofficial Web3 ombudsperson". She has a large following among cryptocurrency skeptics and, in late 2022, was recognized among both Forbes "30 Under 30" people in Social Media

Tracking political influence of the tech industry

In 2024, White's project, Follow the Crypto, tracked political donations from the crypto industry. White and advocacy group Public Citizen filed a campaign finance complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Coinbase in August 2024, alleging that a $25 million donation to a super PAC was in violation of laws affecting federal contractors.

In June of 2026, White launched Tech Influence Watch, an expansion of her previous project which tracked political spending by the crypto industry, and now includes a look at how AI super PACs are influencing elections. In a post announcing the new coverage, White said that there is an overlap in the strategists behind the two campaigns, and pointed out that "The PACs may look different from the outside, but they're increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people."

Personal life and career White was born in 1993 and raised in Maine. While attending Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, White interned at a NASA-funded University of Maine lab that researched lunar habitat module sensors. She attended Boston's Northeastern University, where she participated in two co-ops with the marketing software developer HubSpot. After graduation with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 2016, she continued to work at the company as a software engineer for six years, through May 2022, when she resigned to recover from burnout. As of late 2022, she is an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

White lives in the Greater Boston area. She holds left-wing views that skew toward socialism.