3 Min Read 
This International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting crypto as a liberating tool that promotes privacy, autonomy, and ownership, regardless of gender, race, and creed. Self-custody ownership and the leveraging of decentralized financial services eliminates reliance on and biases imposed by financial intermediaries.
Crypto is for everyone. It’s for all races, all politics, all those who are religiously affiliated, and all of those who are not.
A tool for progress
Financial services have a long history of historical biases towards the physical attributes of individuals, including many women and their access to these tools.
Across the globe, women make up 55% of the unbanked population. Lack of a formal ID, which is a legal requirement for interacting with nearly all traditional financial services, is a key barrier to entry.
This lack of access born from practices that are unfavorable to many women globally, disallows many wealth-generating activities, such as access to small business loans, insurance vehicles, and savings accounts.
While less pronounced in Western nations, much progress is still on the horizon for the developing world, and crypto is a tool that provides a potential gateway for a large population of women to leapfrog forward with respect to their access to wealth preservation and accumulation.
In the West, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of women investing outside of retirement and the windfall from this will likely be a welcomed increase by women all across the globe, with crypto being a highly accessible financial vehicle.
Together we’re using crypto to #BreakTheBias
Equal opportunity and an equal playing field – that’s the ethos of the movement. International Women’s Day began in 1911 and has been a catalyst for much progress. This year, the driving theme of this holiday is #BreakTheBias. A theme which is inspired by the idea that individuals should be judged solely by their merit and nothing else.
In the spirit of this, we’ve partnered with some rockstar women in the crypto space that are helping to push this narrative forward. Hailey Lennon from Crypto Connect, Sarah Satoshi from Ladies in Bitcoin, Amy Matsushima from Women of Crypto, and Crypto Wendy O have joined us in creating a video featuring women in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space to celebrate our community and those who are pushing this industry forward day by day. Each of these women has learned about, promoted, and helped to build organizations that fuel the use of digital assets. Their efforts, among many others, are helping to get this gender agnostic tool in the hands of many women across the globe.
A directory of the women making crypto and blockchain cool
You can now discover projects spearheaded by women in the blockchain & crypto space via our directory → edge.app/international-womens-day. Want to be included? Shoot us an email and we’ll add your project to the list!
Alphanumeric addresses, not ID numbers
Crypto addresses are a string of alphanumeric characters. Unless otherwise disclosed by the address owner, addresses can be controlled by any type of individual without the network having knowledge of that person’s physical appearance. Creating a crypto wallet is as easy as downloading software onto a mobile device. Opening a bank account is as complicated as first being allowed to have an ID, which is really the tip of the iceberg. Join us in celebrating the women who are embracing this technology, building projects in the ecosystem, and using crypto as a tool to #BreakTheBias.
