Growing up in Soviet-era Latvia, Masha McConaghy never imagined she’d become a curator: The only access she had to modern art was in the books her father’s students smuggled into Riga from East Berlin. “I remember sitting on the couch and going through these beautiful books,” she says. “I could make up whole stories from one painting. My imagination went wild.”

McConaghy soon realized that art was her calling. She taught herself French and moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where one of her professors introduced her to curating. “Before it was all old books and dead people,” says McConaghy. “Suddenly I was talking to real people.” McConaghy went on to pursue a museology degree at the Louvre School, and worked at the museum as an assistant curator. “I would go out for a smoke, and see the Louvre, the Tuileries, the sun setting on the city,” she says. “It was magical.”

It’s an impressive résumé, but by the time I met McConaghy in Berlin this year, her career had become much more cutting-edge. Her latest artistic venture? Utilizing blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to revolutionize the art world. We met at a cafe near Alexanderplatz where McConaghy explained how the city’s blossoming tech culture was inspiring her. “It’s refreshing for me coming from the traditional art world,” she says. “People are not afraid to fail.”

Blockchain, or the “spreadsheet in the sky,” as McConaghy likes to call it, acts like a giant online ledger which records every entry and updates everyone who is part of the ledger’s network accordingly. No one owns it, everyone can access it, but once a transaction is recorded in the blockchain, it cannot be removed or altered. In the case of bitcoin, this means that currency transactions can occur securely without the need to use a bank.