"I'm trying to put the cryptography back in crypto," Manning, the former U.S. Army private who spent seven years in prison for one of the largest leaks of documents in military history, said Thursday at Consensus 2023 here. She added that she is "skeptical of speculative assets in general. This goes for both fiat as well as digital."

Along the same theme of promoting privacy, she argued that the internet's basic infrastructure, which is more than a half-century old, is not suited to keeping information private. Privacy shouldn't be something "slapped on top" of the existing internet, but something considered from the start, Manning added.