It’s true. Women entrepreneurs are creating NFT collections that top the charts. This, despite only an estimated 5% of women own NFTs, and 5-15% are creators or founders of collections. The impact, however, of female-led NFT projects is profound.
While one 13-year-old girl launching an NFT collection generating over $4 million isn’t the beginning, another popular woman-led NFT project selling over $40 million in the first two weeks of 2022 is not the end.
Many women NFT artists have taken to nonfungible tokens to create a more diverse and inclusive space in the crypto, web3, blockchain, and NFT realm.
The Before-Scenario
Women have been missing out on a multi-trillion dollar investment opportunity according to an organization working to get women and non-binary people into crypto, NFTs, and web3.
Financial freedom is an important step for women in the promotion of gender equality. However, the web3 market has been male-dominated by a large majority at 81%. Blockchain, NFTs, and cryptocurrency sound too much jargon-like to many beginners in exploring the space. Also, the value and impact of these new technologies are often misconstrued, misrepresented, and misunderstood.
Also Read: HashCash Roped-in For a Micro-Loan Platform for Women Entrepreneurs
Statistics Reveal
Less than half of women across the globe use the internet, against 55% of men. The gap is widening in poorer countries, according to the United Nations’ technology agency (ITU). Women also lag behind in managing and accessing assets or financial services worldwide, as per the World Economic Forum’s annual gender gap report.
Blockchain technology – the fuel behind cryptocurrency and NFTs – is seen as a roadway to attain a fairer, more transparent, and inclusive financial landscape in its decentralised format.
Cryptocurrencies are meanwhile moving from the peripherals of finance to the mainstream, with an increasing number of investors, companies and countries adopting them as investment assets, payment processors, and as a hedge against uncertainty and hyperinflation.
NFTs, meanwhile, have attracted celebrities, artists, and investors, with the capacity for sale of a digital collage this year for over $69 million. This is recorded as the most expensive NFT sale so far. This holds even as the number of NFT buyers remains comparatively small.
While cryptocurrency has drawn the younger population, alongside a fair mix of races, women only comprise about a fifth of U.S. investors, as revealed by a CNBC poll.
Black women, those who have historically been kept out of several potential investment verticals – comprise only 4% of crypto investors.
To establish fairness and inclusivity, British entrepreneur Lavinia Osbourne founded Women in Blockchain Talks as a platform for women. She also plans to launch an NFT marketplace called “Crypto Kweens” for female artists, entrepreneurs, and collectors.
“The inequity exists so deeply and systematically in society, and people bring their biases into all walks of life,” she said, emphasising her own experiences as “steeped in racism”.
“This is why it is so important for diverse voices to be a part of the blockchain conversation – if not, we will have a repeat of the inequality that exists elsewhere,” she said.
Also Read: How to Create a Balanced Crypto Portfolio?
Women in Crypto/NFT
In response to a mammoth effort from several quarters, there is a record rise in the number of women making their mark in this space. Social media is flooded with handles revealing the feminine in the blockchain and crypto space.
The work is gaining traction in the global crypto market: a physical version of an NFT from Boss Beauties – a collection of 10,000 NFT portraits of women, was showcased at the New York Stock Exchange in October 2021.
Tavonia Evans is a U.S.-based data scientist going by the Twitter handle @cryptodeeva. She created Guapcoin, a crypto token to “amplify the economic voice of the Black community”.
“The crypto world is an extension of the tech space, with a huge diversity gap,” she remarked, before going on to explain that access to capital still remains a distant dream for most women of colour.
“That’s why we created Guapcoin – to focus on our own underserved community and do our job in closing the gap,” said Evans – also a member of the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain that advocates for greater inclusion.
Efforts like these will walk the long walk of bridging the gender gap in blockchain, said Walch.
Wrapping up
Success, they say, draws-in followers. The success of the pioneer women in the crypto and NFT space is likely to attract other women. Meanwhile, a number of projects are specially designed to promote entrepreneurship among women in the struggling regions of the world. There are projects up and coming nearly every week. Several of them reserve the potential to yield highly. Women are gradually becoming a part of this disruptive technology-driven investment opportunity.
No Comment