Although conferences, message boards and cryptocurrency threads are overwhelmingly male, there are a handful of powerful women in the space who are looking to change that. Glamour Magazine recently profiled nine of them, and they each come from different backgrounds. Some worked in gaming before turning to crypto full-time. Amber Baldet worked in banking at J.P. Morgan. Others, like Elizabeth Stark, worked as an activist against internet censorship and taught courses at Stanford on the Internet copyright wars. Stark ultimately became the CEO of Lighting Labs, which is the company that builds the second-layer software for the Bitcoin payment network.
“For me I always saw the future and the potential of this as bringing it to the entire world,” Stark told Glamour. “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.”
Tess Rinearson, 24, also wants to see crypto go mainstream — and she’s passionate about having a say in what it looks like.
“I was like, I don’t want the next financial system to be designed by only white, libertarian leaning men,” Rinearson told Glamour. “There was a little bit of, I want to help write this story too.”
Others like Galia Benartzi are compelled by altruism. After co-founding a social gaming company for smartphones in 2010, Genartzi went to Johns Hopkins’ School of Danced International Studies in Bologna, Italy. It was there she learned about how widespread financial inequity is.
“It’s really problematic,” Benartzi told Glamour. “We have this system that breeds inequality and we see it in every single nation. Income gaps are getting wider, and the wealth distribution is more and more unfair. We have more poor people and richer rich people ever before.”
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