Women in crypto: Maggie Love on characterizing female blockchain experts

Like most crypto professionals at the time, Love had a background working in finance and technology — fields traditionally skewed heavily male. Although her personal experiences as a woman in the industry have been positive, she is concerned about the demographics of the industry.

Despite the current market downturn, many crypto supporters believe that blockchain will significantly change the way we buy, sell, save and store value. Yet few women lead the development of crypto products and services or act as thought leaders in the space.

A December 2021 report found that fewer than 5% of all crypto entrepreneurs are women, and that there is a gap in crypto education – Mastercard’s 2022 New Payments Index found that women are significantly less aware of crypto and digital asset terminology than men. Love’s concern is that most women will be left out and left behind by the next wave of technological innovation — and the crypto ecosystem will be worse off for it.

Today, in addition to serving as W3bCloud’s Director of Ecosystem and Partnerships, Love uses her education initiative SheFi to give more women the tools to get involved. Earlier this year, she also helped launch The Belle Block, a Mastercard-led initiative that aims to bring more women and underrepresented minorities into crypto and blockchain.

How did Love transform from crypto neophyte to one of the industry’s rising stars? “I continued to follow that curiosity and passion,” she says. Throughout 2016, she devoted her nights and weekends to blockchain research, and in the summer of 2017 she worked full-time at ConsenSys, a blockchain software developer in Brooklyn. As director of strategic initiatives, she worked closely with CEO Joseph Lubin, who also co-founded Ethereum, a popular blockchain platform.

After Love put together a pitch on Ethereum that won over the CEO of semiconductor giant AMD, Lubin asked her to close the deal that spawned W3bCloud, a joint venture between AMD and ConsenSys.

Love is the only woman among W3bCloud’s five co-founders. “Opportunities are being built and captured by men who are already benefiting from the traditional financial system,” she says. “We can’t call this a new economic paradigm if people who don’t participate in the current system aren’t part of the new one either.”

The same qualities of crypto that appealed to Love – financial freedom, expanded access to wealth – have the potential to empower women around the world.

“For the first time, no one can say you can’t do something with your money,” Love explains. “It’s this inherently feminist technology.”

But before diving into crypto, new users need to dig into the details of the various protocols, platforms, tokens and currencies. During a run on a fall day in 2019, Love was mulling over the situation when a name popped into her head: SheFi, a riff on the crypto concept of decentralized finance, or DeFi. “It felt like the universe was telling me something,” she says.

During that winter, she put together a virtual interactive DeFi bootcamp. She used the lockdown to create elaborate guides so that participants could immediately get first-hand experience with digital currency. “You can’t be a bystander in crypto,” she says. “You actually have to use it.”

In autumn 2020, she built her first SheFi cohort, consisting of around 20 friends and acquaintances. For the current course – SheFi’s seventh – Love has enrolled 600 women and non-binary people from around the world. “We do blockchain wallets, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, social, staking,” she says. “I cover everything.”

In addition to more than 40 hours of live Q&As, demos and classes (titles include “Becoming a Blockchain Baddie” and “I Want My NFTs!”), SheFi offers guest lectures and community discussion platforms for networking.

Participants receive NFT badges for attendance and successful quizzes. For many, it serves as a gateway to investing in crypto; several participants have even found work in the industry.

Beyond that, Love emphasizes that SheFi is as much a collective as a class. With communities from Portugal to Africa to Southeast Asia, SheFi gives women a platform to carve out a place in the crypto economy.

“We wouldn’t have to lean in if we were all at the table,” says Love. “I make sure everyone is at the table.”