Sunday March 8th is International Women’s Day. To celebrate this, we’re going to take a look at some of the notable women in crypto who we admire and we encourage you to explore their work and projects.
While women are interested and invest in crypto, it is still a male-dominated industry. According to Google Analytics, 12% of crypto enthusiasts are women. This stat comes from Google Analytics estimating the number of women participating in Bitcoin community engagement online. However, a study published by Grayscale Investments in December 2019 found that 43% of respondents who expressed interest in Bitcoin were female.
Another report published in the summer of 2019 by Bitpanda, suggested that 22% of crypto holders are women. This study also found that most crypto holders, regardless of gender, worked in finance, marketing, or banking, but women crypto holders were far more likely to be interested in computers and coding than the average female internet user, compared to male crypto holders and the average male internet user. This shows that crypto investing is not as widespread amongst women, regardless of interests, as it is with men.
The World’s Most Influential Women in Crypto
There are many women involved in the crypto industry, but here are just some of the women helping to facilitate the goal of widespread crypto and digital asset acceptance and adoption. Their stories are inspiring examples of determination and innovation and we can learn from them.
Kathleen Breitman – Co-founder and CEO of Tezos
Kathleen Breitman graduated from Cornell University in 2012 and worked at The Wall Street Journal before she and her husband Arthur released the white paper for Tezos in 2014. Tezos officially launched in 2016 and its Initial Coin Offering in July 2017 raised a record-breaking $232 million. Tezos gives its stakeholders online voting powers, and doesn’t rely on mining in the way that Bitcoin does. Instead the blockchain uses a proof-of-stake consensus model and everybody who owns coins has voting powers on upgrades to the system. While Kathleen’s husband initially came up with the idea for Tezos, Kathleen took on the role of publicizing it to the public. In one interview she said: “Arthur’s the brains. I’m the brawn.”
Toni Lane Casserly – Co-founder & former CEO of CoinTelegraph
Co-founder of CoinTelegraph, and an early-blockchain pioneer and enthusiast, Toni Lane is sometimes affectionately known as the “Joan of Arc of Blockchain” by her peers in the crypto space. She is an advisor on many blockchain-based projects including DigitalBits – a project that brings loyalty points to blockchain. A poet, philanthropist, and keynote speaker, Toni Lane is also the founder of CULTU.RE, an organization which “re-incentivizes individuals acting within governance networks to form interdependent marketplaces, which enable self-sovereign, self-organizing, voluntary networks to co-opt and compete with traditional infrastructure for the benefit of humanity.”
Tavonia Evans – Founder of Guap Coin
Tavonia is the founder of Guap Coin (GUAP), a cryptocurrency launched in 2017 on the Ethereum blockchain aimed at people of colour. It promotes diversity and financial inclusion in the crypto space by rewarding its users for spending, reinvesting and circulating money in the black community.
Elizabeth Stark – CEO and Co-founder of Lightning Labs
Elizabeth graduated from Harvard Law in 2008 – the same year the Bitcoin white paper was published. She then taught computer science at prestigious universities like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford before raising $2.5 million from investors for Lightning Labs. It was at Stanford where she first heard about bitcoin. Nobody doubted Bitcoin’s value, but it had a utility issue. Its transaction times were slow, making it unsuitable for purchases in places such as coffee shops.
Elizabeth’s company Lightning Labs is an open source system which allows users to make small Bitcoin transactions through payment channels, with the blockchain reserved for final settlement. It means bitcoin transactions can be made much faster than they usually would be and is a solution to the Bitcoin utility issue. Elizabeth is often credited as having the ability to connect projects with people and has been described as a “warrior queen”. She once said: “If Bitcoin only serves a very small subset of the population I think we will not have succeeded. I want to see this go mainstream.”
Elizabeth Rossiello – Founder and CEO of BitPesa
Originally from New York, Elizabeth Rosiello started BitPesa in 2013 after years of working in finance. BitPesa uses blockchain technology to make faster payments between African countries and the rest of the world. It allows businesses to grow and operate within markets that they could not have before due to expense or difficulty. BitPesa has the deepest liquidity of any Africn exchange and was the first blockchain company to be licensed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.
Perianne Boring – Founder and President of The Chamber of Digital Commerce
Founded in 2014, The Chamber of Digital Commerce is a trade association representing the blockchain and digital assets industry. In 2018, Perianne Boring was named one of “America’s Top 50 Women in Tech” by Forbes and one of the “10 Most Influential People in Blockchain” by CoinDesk. She started her career as a legislative analyst in the U.S. House of Representatives and then became a TV host and anchor of an international finance program. The Chamber of Digital Commerce promotes the use and acceptance of digital assets and blockchain-based technology.
At CoinField, we want everybody, regardless of gender, location or economic status to be able to invest in crypto. The crypto community is full of passionate people who truly believe crypto is the future. While we should continue to spread that message, we also need to promote equality if crypto is to truly become widespread.