Headlines and Telegram channels may over-index in 'crypto bros' culture, but there is no denying the contributions of marginalized communities in crypto. This post highlights online crypto platforms fostering a community for womxn, womxn of color, Black crypto, and other historically marginalized folks. The shared data explanation for higher crypto adoption among people of color often reiterates the pitfalls of central finance; however, the inherent qualities of a collective community mindset make the web3 sector ripe for higher adoption. While the focus of Discerns.xyz is to use theoretical frameworks to explore the pitfalls of exclusion, it is essential to pause and recognize what possible drivers to inclusion in crypto because these communities (1) exist and (2) are ample in use cases.
In 2021, the Pew Center research survey measured Black and Hispanic folks as the highest leading demographics in cryptocurrency adoption in the United States. Driving this adoption rate could also be explained by central finance narratives for lack of participation from communities of color. Such as distrust in traditional financial institutions, the historical abuse, racism in interacting with them, or the simple fact that lenders lend to their network is limited to reflect the life experiences represented in your employee make-up. The problematic relationship between Black households and financial institutions alone has quantifiable consequences; the FDIC 2017 national survey determined 47 percent of Black households are unbanked or underbanked.
Distrust and poor user experiences in financial institutions could explain some Black and Brown user adoption. Still, another contributing factor to this ease and rapid user adoption is that, inherently, such communities already have a collective mindset. When examining inherent bias or traditions in social groups, colonizing cultures is used to an extractive relationship. Meanwhile, indigenous societies existed for thousands of years to reach community actualization, as explained from this First Nation perspective. In present-day crypto land, this stored memory among marginalized folks translates to sharing a network across distributed nodes or pooling resources together for a DAO or DeFi exchange because there is already an emphasis in the physical world on community care. Transformation with DLTs could perhaps draw in Black and Brown innovators who can inherently embrace these collective community mindsets and are open to understanding technology.
In 2018 I participated in a hackathon partially sponsored by Holochain to expose women to blockchain technologies. I still remember the conversation and lightbulb moment with co-founder Arthur Brock. The idea the team was playing around with was a proof of employment history where time spent at a company was stored on-chain, dates, company name, and position title(s). What made it a blockchain use case was that the applicant user could share the public hash of their experiences. Thus, pseudo-anonymously prove their work history without over-sharing personal information of a full-blown employer verification early in the applicant process.
Why would this matter? From the team's perspective, giving so much data, even from a first or last name, could potentially introduce unwanted bias into the candidacy pursuit. For instance, you might have to overshare a different last name used at a previous job. For a woman in the United States, that could flag questions about whether she was recently married or divorced. A first name change could also give away contradicting gender impressions or force the applicant to share their dead name. Someone with a foreign-sounding name could introduce questions about immigration status or racial assumptions. All this is presented by the data point of a first and last name when as a candidate, verification of work history should focus on confirming work occurring at a company. At least, that was what our pitch argued. The technology is neutral and almost always the easy part. In this case, blockchain and the dApps platforms were already there. The ideas of what to build on came from diverse women with various biased experiences and collective mindsets when searching for meaningful tech work.
There is an explosion of beautiful projects with traces of inclusion in this space. Blockchain is paradigm-shifting in technology solutions but not revolutionary on its own. When Bitcoin launched, there was never a goal for financial inclusion. There is only so much to expect from the launch of a successful combination of game theories and computational equations with cryptographic features. Bitcoin's white paper proved that these features could work for a decentralized, immutable ledger. But, it never claimed to be a project for financial inclusion. Yet, I've observed that folks who have spent time trying to solve these wicked problems could connect the dots given the underlying blockchain technology principles. I am hopeful that entrepreneurs will leapfrog innovating in centralized finance and web2 fintech and instead build meaningful, community-altering web3 solutions for womxn, womxn of color, Black crypto, and beyond.
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