Women in Cryptocurrency
ON A RAINY Friday evening in February, a dozen women huddled over flutes of champagne in a corner of the cavernous, trendy Williamsburg Hotel in Brooklyn. Varying in age, nationality, geography, and professional background, some donned the startup uniform of hoodies and sneakers while others looked at home on Wall Street in tailored suits and heels. As they introduced themselves and explained how they knew the event’s host, venture investor Jalak Jobanputra, they emanated nervous energy and a shared enthusiasm for one topic: cryptocurrency.
Like most participants in the exploding field, they were evangelical in their convictions that blockchain technology is the future. When I expressed wariness of falling too far down the crypto rabbit hole, the silence was so awkward I feared spontaneously bursting into flames. I might well have said I’m a flat-earther. This is a group of believers. They do not understand or have time for tourists.
Jobanputra gathered this group—including JP Morgan blockchain lead Amber Baldet, bitcoin lawyer Carol Van Cleef, venture investor Arianna Simpson, Digital Currency Group VP Meltem Demirors, and startup entrepreneurs Leanne Kemp, Jutta Steiner, Preethi Kasireddy and Elizabeth Rossiello—to foster connections among the women of crypto. On one hand, it’s a regular gathering of business people looking to talk shop with other smart, connected leaders and up-and-comers in their field, all of whom, on this occasion, just happen to be women. There’s little talk of “leaning in” or “having it all.” They are here to talk about the actual work.
On the other hand, the summit is a show of female visibility and community in a field that’s known for combining the worst aspects of the finance and tech industries into a bro-y culture of shallow greed, sexism, pump-and-dump schemes, and crime.
“I’m tired of hearing there aren’t enough women in blockchain,” declared Emma Channing, CEO Satis Group, an advisory firm for initial coin offerings, as part of her introduction. Another attendee illustrated the stakes: “We need to make sure this phase of technology doesn’t go the way of the internet, with everything happening in one place, one demographic deciding how this stuff gets built out and how we use it.” Through the weekend, the group tweeted about their discussions, using the hashtag #FPVWomen.
The summit’s attendees shared tales of raising venture capital, hiring employees, trading crypto, developing technology, advising regulatory bodies, and launching initial coin offerings. They’d found cryptocurrency religion after working in currency trading, corporate finance, venture capital, private equity, engineering, diamond mining, NGOs, mergers and acquisitions, public relations and law. They debated the future of regulation in their field and the pros and cons of public versus private blockchains.
I’d heard similar versions of the same debates at a different cryptocurrency conference earlier in the week, except the vast majority of speakers and audience members there were young white men. I was not surprised when a male attendee called me “sweetheart,” though that minor annoyance paled in comparison to January’s North American Bitcoin Conference, which featured just three women out of 88 speakers and an after-party at a strip club.
The field of cryptocurrency is still in its infancy and does not need to mirror the broader tech industry’s sexism and lack of diversity. There’s no lack of interest in the field from women—a Meetup group in New York City called Women in Blockchain boasts more than 1,400 members, for example.
Yet signs of disparity, at least when it comes to digital currency ownership, are already abundant. Cryptocurrency wealth is highly concentrated, with an estimated 40 percent of bitcoin held by just 1,000 people. Some surveys show 71 percent of digital currency is owned by men; one digital wallet company says fewer than 6 percent of its customers are women.