Chess, Capital, and Cultural Power: Interview with Ekaterina Kondratenko, Founder of Chess Arts Club

We sat down with Ekaterina Kondratenko, founder of Chess Arts Club in Dubai and a long-time participant in the global crypto ecosystem.

Her career spans early-stage blockchain media, infrastructure-level mining operations, institutional partnerships, and cross-border community building. She entered the industry in its formative years and observed its evolution from a fragmented experiment into a global financial and cultural system.

Today, through Chess Arts Club, she is exploring a different question: how trust, reputation, and intellectual alignment are formed in an environment where capital is abundant, but meaningful context is increasingly rare.

You entered crypto in 2015, long before it became a mainstream industry. What initially pulled you into that world?

Like many important things in life, it started unexpectedly. At the time, I was still at university. My boyfriend was building a lottery project on Ethereum, and through him I was first introduced to blockchain. It was my first exposure to conversations around decentralization, digital ownership, and systems that were not controlled by traditional financial institutions.

At first, I was fascinated by the technology itself. There was a real sense that something entirely new was being built in real time.

But very quickly, I realized that what interested me even more was the people. Crypto at that stage was not an industry. It was a global network of outsiders, engineers, economists, and entrepreneurs who were all operating slightly outside of conventional logic. Many of the ideas sounded irrational to the outside world, but internally there was a strong sense of direction and conviction.

That environment pulled me in. Soon after, I joined BitNovosti, one of the largest blockchain media platforms in Russia at the time. Together with editor Ekaterina Tarasova, I spent years moving between conferences, interviews, airports, and conversations that often felt like they were taking place in a parallel reality.

Through media, I had the opportunity to interview figures such as Vitalik Buterin, Roger Ver, John McAfee, founders of major blockchain companies, institutional investors, and early infrastructure builders.

Looking back, I think the most important part of that period was not access to technology, but access to people who were actively building a new financial and technological system before it had any certainty of success.

Through BitNovosti, you had direct access to many of the early key figures in Web3. How did those relationships actually form?

There was no structured strategy behind it. Working in media gave me proximity, but relationships were built through repetition and consistency rather than positioning.

I showed up, asked questions, created content, attended events, and stayed engaged in the ecosystem over a long period of time.

In hindsight, what people often underestimate is how slowly trust compounds in emerging industries. Especially in early Web3, people were not just evaluating ideas — they were evaluating each other.

After years of consistent presence, you stop being perceived as an external participant. You become part of the environment itself. That shift is what actually creates access.

What was the transition from media into infrastructure like, especially your work with ViaBTC?

That transition changed my understanding of the industry completely. I was introduced to the mining sector by my close friend Irina Kocherga, who connected me with key figures in the Chinese mining ecosystem. That eventually led to my role as Director of Business Development at ViaBTC, one of the largest mining pools globally.

Until that point, my perspective on crypto was shaped mainly by narratives, interviews, and market-level conversations. Mining brought me into the infrastructure layer.

Suddenly, the industry stopped being abstract. It became physical. Energy consumption, logistics, hardware cycles, regulatory constraints — all of these factors started defining what was actually possible.

One of my focuses was developing mining opportunities in Siberia, where extreme temperatures create unexpected operational advantages for large-scale infrastructure.

That experience fundamentally changed my view of Web3. It showed me that no matter how strong the narrative is, everything ultimately depends on physical systems that either support or limit scale.

Crypto has evolved significantly over the past decade. Do you still believe it’s possible to read where Web3 is heading?

I think prediction is the wrong framework. Most major shifts are already visible before they become widely accepted. The challenge is not forecasting the future, but correctly interpreting early signals.

In my experience, the people who consistently understand where the industry is going are not necessarily the ones making bold predictions. They are the ones who are closely observing infrastructure changes, regulatory shifts, and behavioral patterns over time.

Web3 has become more complex, but complexity does not remove signals — it just makes them harder to interpret without a broader perspective.

You’ve worked across media, infrastructure, and now community building. Do you see a common thread across these stages?

Yes — and it’s access. In media, access was informational. In infrastructure, it was operational. In community building, it becomes relational.

Over time, I realized that the most valuable layer is not information or technology, but the structure of relationships between people who actually build and allocate capital. That realization eventually led to Chess Arts Club.

Before launching Chess Arts Club, you worked with Mastercard and relocated to Dubai. What changed at that stage?

At the end of 2022, I moved to Dubai from Brazil after being invited to work with Mastercard on media-related initiatives. It was a valuable experience, but also a turning point.

For a long time, I had been helping other organizations communicate their vision, build audiences, and structure narratives around their ecosystems. At some point, I realized I wanted to build something that reflected my own perspective.

Around the same time, chess re-entered my life in a very unexpected way. My father was a chess master and taught me the game when I was six years old. Like many children, I eventually stopped playing and forgot most of it.

Years later, in Dubai, I became involved in developing a chess-focused community project and found myself relearning the game almost from scratch. It was not only a technical return to chess, but also an emotional one. It felt like reconnecting with something I had put aside for many years. That became the starting point for Chess Arts Club.

What is Chess Arts Club fundamentally trying to create?

What we are really building is a controlled environment for high-quality interactions between founders, investors, creatives, and strategic thinkers.

Most modern networking environments are optimized for scale and visibility. They prioritize volume of interactions over depth of relationships.

Chess creates a different dynamic. It slows down interaction and introduces a shared intellectual framework that removes the pressure of traditional networking behavior. As a result, conversations become more natural and less transactional.

Exclusivity is central to many private communities. How do you define it in your case?

Exclusivity is often misunderstood as status signaling. In reality, it is about cultural integrity.

Every community develops its own internal logic over time. If that logic is not protected, the quality of interactions inevitably degrades. In that sense, selection is less about wealth or reputation and more about alignment with the type of environment you are trying to build.

The goal is not to exclude people. The goal is to maintain conditions where meaningful interactions can continue to exist.

In private communities, what matters more: money, influence, or reputation?

Reputation becomes the dominant form of capital over time. Money creates access, but it does not create trust. Influence creates visibility, but it does not guarantee reliability.

Reputation is accumulated slowly through behavior over time, and in private environments it becomes the primary filter through which people evaluate one another.

In many cases, it determines whether collaboration, investment, or meaningful exchange of opportunities even becomes possible.

One of the most notable moments for Chess Arts Club was hosting Magnus Carlsen. What stood out from that experience?

There was a moment during the evening that stayed with me. We asked Magnus a simple question: if chess had never existed, what kind of business he would have built.

He paused for a moment and said he genuinely could not imagine a version of his life without chess. What struck me was not the answer itself, but what it revealed about mastery.

At a certain level, a profession stops being something you do and becomes something that defines how you think. That is something I’ve also observed in founders and investors who operate at a very high level. Their domain is different, but the cognitive structure is similar.

Why did Instagram become the primary channel for Chess Arts Club, given that Web3 usually relies on other platforms?

Because narrative matters more than format. Most Web3 communication happens in highly functional environments like Twitter, Telegram, or Discord. These platforms are effective for information exchange, but not necessarily for cultural positioning.

Instagram allowed us to communicate something different — atmosphere, identity, and context. One of our chess videos reached tens of millions of views, not because of chess itself, but because of how it was framed as a cultural experience rather than a technical discipline. That shift in framing is what made it resonate beyond the core audience.

How do you see Chess Arts Club evolving in the coming years?

I don’t think in terms of fixed categories like “club” or “brand.” What we are building is a long-term ecosystem where people with similar levels of ambition and strategic thinking can interact in a structured but informal environment.

Whether it evolves into a global network, a cultural platform, or a hybrid structure will depend on how the community itself develops over time. What remains constant is the focus on quality of interaction rather than scale.

Conclusion

As information becomes increasingly abundant and access becomes easier, differentiation is moving toward trust, reputation, and carefully designed environments where meaningful relationships can actually develop.

In that sense, Chess Arts Club reflects a wider transformation: from open, high-volume networking toward curated ecosystems built around alignment, strategy, and long-term thinking.

The chessboard is simply the interface. The real value lies in the structure of relationships it makes possible.