From Glamour’s May “Money Issue” comes a thorough examination of women in cryptocurrency. We all know one of the strengths of cryptocurrencies is that they, as the author states, “don’t care who you are.” Despite the fact that Bitcoin and the crypto world started, and grew, disproportionately male and white; there are plenty of women in the crypto world—and the same drive many women draw on to rise in a field full of men often helps them raise the bar for everyone.
Women leaders in the crypto field share their struggles, successes, goals, insights, inspirations, and expertise. There is an equalizing power of a currency and investment opportunity with no gatekeeper—and are taking advantage of it to make their mark. Tech development teams and cryptocurrency flourish when women are included, working toward better solutions for everyone, and as more women succeed in cryptocurrency they help one another grow and advance—truly a case of women investing in women.
Read below and click through for the full article to learn about women trailblazers in cryptocurrency and blockchain; including new innovations in tech and cryptocurrency, giving back, reaching out to minority communities, the importance of diversity, promoting the work of other women in the field, working toward a more equitable financial system and more.
When dinner conversations turn to cryptocurrency, as they often do these days, I brace for a grilling, because I’ve been a reporter covering the topic for six years. “Do you own any?” “Is it too late to get rich?” “What’s the next big coin?” The answer is always the same: I’m neither an investor nor a financial adviser. (So no, I’m not going to tell you whether to buy or sell either.)
But the main reason I won’t give you advice is that, to me, the price tag on a digital coin is its most boring feature. What’s most fascinating about cryptocurrencies is they don’t care who you are. Be you a man, woman, person of color, trans, someone with bad credit, someone with no credit—if you can log on to a computer and push the right buttons, you can send money just like anyone else. That accessibility is a big part of what makes this technology such a breakthrough. There’s no gatekeeper.
That’s all possible because of how these currencies are built: Cryptocurrency transactions are processed and recorded by peer-to-peer networks—not any one individual, bank, or government. These networks get around relying on those institutions by putting to work a group of people on the network called miners. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, thousands of those miners are competing at this very moment to process a bunch of transactions and add them to a record called the blockchain. That competition is really a race to solve a series of cryptographic puzzles—the first one to make it across the finish line gets rewarded with a handful of new Bitcoins, hot off the minting press. Those entries in the blockchain record are then verified by other people on the network.
Think about that for a second: a group of strangers working together to secure a global currency and payment system without the authority of any formal institution. That’s technologically astounding. It’s also completely changing how we use money, because a lot of things happen when banks and governments are not making all the rules. Suddenly borders, time zones, and working hours become irrelevant. You can send a payment anywhere in the world at any time and have it go through, generally, within minutes—you don’t need permission from your bank, you don’t need to go through a company like PayPal or Venmo.“There’s a massive opportunity here to change the global financial structure, to change a lot of ways that society interacts with technology,” says Elizabeth Stark, the CEO of Lightning Labs, which, in March, released an early version of much anticipated software that is designed to make Bitcoin transactions faster, cheaper, and more private. “And it is crucially important that women participate.”
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