Toni Lane Casserly — a cryptocurrency entrepreneur known in the industry as the “Joan of Arc of blockchain” — died last week, her family said. She was 29.

A sought-after public speaker and co-founder of the cryptocurrency news website Cointelegraph, Casserly was known as a staunch advocate for the blockchain technology that helps power the bitcoin market.

“Toni saw how technology was a tool to unleash human consciousness,” Lucian Tarnowski of Civana, a nonprofit focused on sustainability and technology, wrote in a tribute to Casserly on Thursday. “She was a brilliant pioneer in the role blockchains would provide in the return to community.”

Casserly’s father, Nick Casserly, announced her April 14 death on Facebook last week. He did not reveal the cause but said she hadn’t been well since last August. News of her death first surfaced on the cryptocurrency blog Coinfomania.

Casserly viewed technologies such as blockchain — the decentralized ledger created to record bitcoin transactions — as tools that could help improve societies and governments. That philosophy was manifested in Smart Love, a blockchain-powered platform she helped create that allowed LGBT couples to get married, according to Tarnowski.

Casserly served as an adviser to a wide range of companies and organizations, from the real-estate platform Propy to the Silicon Valley think tank Institute for the Future, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also started a charity funded by bitcoin that provided on-the-ground aid in Sierra Leone amid the Ebola crisis in Africa, her profile says.