2025 Ones to Watch - Rising Stars: Glwadys Fayolle, SkyTrade

“Glwadys combines deep technical insight with exceptional design vision to create intuitive, impactful products. Her contributions to SkyTrade’s product and design have been vital in launching a truly groundbreaking platform. She’s driving innovation at the intersection of blockchain and urban development, making a meaningful difference and inspiring the future of the industry.” - Marcin Zduniak - Co Founder and CTO, SkyTrade.

What recent professional milestone or project are you most proud of, and why? I’m most proud of launching SkyTrade, the world’s first platform to tokenize and trade air rights on-chain. We’ve turned a static, overlooked asset into a liquid, investable class. Since launch, 30K users have signed up, 15K air rights have been tokenized (valued at $57 million), and SkyTrade Towers now manage $8 million in AUM. With 100K community followers, we’re proving that vertical space is a scalable, accessible, and globally relevant frontier in urban finance.

What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in your career so far, and what did it teach you? Building SkyTrade meant creating a new financial market from scratch: liquid air rights. The biggest challenge was harmonizing complex zoning laws, real estate regulations, and blockchain infrastructure into a single user-friendly system. It taught me that true innovation requires systems thinking, legal fluency, and cross-sector collaboration. Innovation doesn’t happen in silos — it happens when you connect ideas across industries that rarely talk to each other.

What is your top advice for someone just starting out in your field? If you’re working at the frontier of Web3 and real-world assets, your greatest tool is clarity. Learn to communicate your product’s value in a way anyone can understand — especially outside the tech world. Don’t chase hype; focus on solving real problems. And for builders: design for trust. Visual clarity, user context, and transparency are everything. Build like you’re creating infrastructure that must last for decades, not just a season.

Who has been pivotal in your professional development, and how have they influenced you? Jonathan Dockrell, CEO at SkyTrade challenged me to see real estate as programmable infrastructure, not just physical space. That shift in mindset shaped how I built SkyTrade—not as a product, but as an ecosystem. His influence taught me to think beyond features and focus on systems that bridge public and private value. It redefined how I lead, how I design, and how I build technology meant to last and scale across diverse urban and financial landscapes.