Trust, Money, Women: what we all have with crypto
The crypto industry is built on one fundamental principle: trust. If you want to learn the ways that all of this affects our futures, we have to discuss it. Cryptocurrencies are something all of us should keep an eye on closely as this represents a new way to trade goods and money. In other words, it’s about how wealth will be created and managed in the future.
Women cannot miss this transformation if our goal is to tight the financial gender gap.
Back to trust. Trust is defined by the dictionary as “firm belief in someone or something’s reliability, truth, ability, or strength”. Under the law, a trust is an arrangement where a person (a trustee) holds assets in trust for the benefit of another person or persons (beneficiaries). Not much new here.
Trust in our society is established by intermediaries. If you think about your bank for example, it’s an intermediary that secures trust between people and companies in financial transactions (I’m not talking about a fiduciary trust which by definition is something else different).
To establish trust, an intermediary must be reliable, transparent, and centralized, and here is where crypto comes in: Blockchain technology is at the foundation of crypto and trust is native to it.
In the blockchain, assets and information can be stored, moved, transmitted, exchanged, and managed without the involvement of intermediaries. It means the way our whole society is established might change as more solutions can be designed without the need for an intermediary.
In a blockchain, trust is established by peers across a global ledger. Each peer hosts a copy of a block of data. A block is created every few minutes with all transactions from the previous minutes.
This new block of information will be linked to the previous blocks and this is the chain: to confirm one single transaction you must validate it in every block in the chain. This is far safer and faster than what we’re used to today.
It is possible to imagine solutions without intermediaries in a wide range of industries. New fields and positions could replace many jobs. In the coming years, we will definitely see this happening more quickly than it has in the past.
Women’s participation in disruptive technologies can mean social mobility, a smaller gender gap, and a future with less inequality on the one hand, but can also mean the opposite if we do not take part in it.
When I say that, I don’t mean you should invest in crypto (although you can if you want). I mean you should be learning about it, gaining skills in technology, and realizing there is no turning back to the analog world.
To create a society with gender equality and social justice, we must follow the money. Men already know this pretty well, which is why 74% of crypto holders in the U.S. were male and 71% were white in 2021, according to this Gemini report.
We cannot forget that women still maintain unhappy relationships, violence, and abuse every day for the sake of money. We will probably see more generations of women still struggling with the same issues if we do not fight this right now.
Trust is power. Money is power. And power in the right hands can change the world.
