Katrina Donaghy

Katrina Donaghy did not come to water through a laboratory, which is most of what makes her interesting. She spent years inside Australian government, at every level of it, and one of the jobs that shaped her was disaster management in her early thirties, getting local councils to understand their own natural-disaster risk. What struck her was that the country was spending millions every year helping those councils map their risks, and then all that hard-won information just sat there, locked inside one department, unable to be shared with anyone else. So when she found blockchain a few years later, she did not see a coin to launch, she saw a way to make trusted information move between people who do not trust each other. That is the thread that runs through everything she has built since, and it is why she founded Civic Ledger in late 2016.

Katrina Donaghy is careful to say she did not start the way most of the 2016 crypto crowd did. The fashionable move back then was to raise money through an ICO, an Initial Coin Offering (basically selling your own digital token to the public), and then go hunting for a problem to point your shiny new blockchain at. She did the opposite. With the bare bones of what would become Water Ledger, her company's water product, she went to the Australian government first and asked the unglamorous question: is this actually a problem worth solving, and would this technology genuinely make it better? She credits that order of operations, problem first and technology second, for why the company is still standing when so many of its 2016 peers are not.

Katrina Donaghy's big idea is that a water right is non-fungible, and that is the heart of her two-part (don't) Waste Water episode built around water becoming a non-fungible token. Here is what she means. In Queensland alone there are 23 separate water supply schemes, and she describes each one as a little nation state, because inside its borders the rules are written around its own hydrology, its own dams and channels, its own access. One scheme literally cannot trade water with another, because the physics and the regulation do not allow it. So you cannot treat water like a barrel of identical oil. Every parcel is tied to a place and a set of rules, which is exactly what a non-fungible token is good at representing, and it is why generic financial-market tooling has never fit water properly.

Katrina Donaghy puts the real problem in plain language: water markets in Australia are drowning in information asymmetry and opacity. They were built up over decades of complicated regulation, so a farmer who wants to buy or sell water usually has to go through a broker or a private exchange, and the data about who owns what and what it traded for ends up sitting in private hands. When a market is that murky, she argues, water stops flowing to its highest-value use, and water you cannot move efficiently is water that quite literally sits there and evaporates. Her favourite one-line distillation of the fix is almost boringly practical: today, water and money do not move at the same time, and a working market is one where they finally do. To prove it, Civic Ledger ran the world's first blockchain-based water market pilot in Far North Queensland in 2020, in a scheme of around a thousand water users.

Katrina Donaghy has since spun that water work into its own company, Water Ledger, which she co-founded in July 2024 and where she now serves as co-founder and CEO, leading the APAC region. The ambition is bigger than any single country: she wants Water Ledger to become the shared order-management infrastructure that water markets everywhere run on, owned by no single player, so that the world can always see the true state of how much water there is and where it is going. It is a long way from grant paperwork at Brisbane City Council, and she is the first to say startup land is genuinely hard work and not to be glamorised, but it is the same instinct she started with: water is a public good and a cultural one, and the people who actually need it, the farmers and the growers, should be the ones whose problem we solve.

“Water and money don't move at the same time and you want water and money to move at the same time.”

That sentence is the whole pitch, and it is why a former government grants manager ended up building water-market plumbing for the rest of the world. You can trace the audited company facts on her companies' pages and the way I source them on my Leviathan database.