Big Questions and the Need for Decentralization Occupy Participants at the SheFi Summit at EthCC
Maggie Love’s SheFi is forging ahead to ensure women are equally represented in crypto
“Nothing starts decentralized,” said Briony Driscoll, speaking to about 200 people in Brussels. Even Bitcoin, she pointed out, was created by (possibly) a single person.
Driscoll is a New York-barred corporate lawyer, and one of about 30 women speaking at SheFi Summit – a one-day “feminine-first experiential event” preceding the official kickoff of this year’s Ethereum Community Conference.
A mostly female audience gathered at TheMerode. The private members club sits near the imposing Palace of Justice. We sat inside an airy glass-paned atrium, decorated with plants and furnished with cushioned black chairs. Lining the back wall was a full coffee bar, where baristas doled out kombuchas and Americanos.
Two years ago, Driscoll took the SheFi course, an eight-week program for “educational instruction, hands-on tech demos, and peer support, aimed at accelerating Web3 careers.” SheFi was created – founder Maggie Love said – because “despite the permissionless nature of blockchain, there’s a significant cultural, educational, and interest gap.” According to a 2023 study, only 13 percent of founding teams include at least one woman.
Driscoll’s talk focused on navigating the regulatory uncertainty of tokens in the U.S. That’s a proverbial minefield of a topic. “Stay the fuck out of the U.S.” is the prevailing advice, she said, quoting her firm’s Digital Assets partner, Jason Gottlieb – counsel that feels more prudent the closer we get to the election.
The day’s programming covered the gamut, from regulation to decentralized AI, on-chain social to the elusive real-world use cases for blockchain.
“Is there any real world utility for blockchain at all?” asked Anke Liu, ecosystem growth lead at the Stellar Development Foundation.
Liu highlighted various ecosystem builders “focused on impact,” attributing blockchain’s true utility to the folks serving the underserved – especially the unbanked. Coala Pay founder Melyn McKay, for instance, used Stellar to build end-to-end financial systems in Somalia that – when coupled with a weather oracle – have decreased aid times from months to hours.
Liu herself had just returned from Nairobi. There she paid for goods with Peer, a “financial super app” that allows folks in underbanked countries to transact in the stablecoin USDC or in XLM, the native Stellar token.
Access and inclusion – central components of SheFi’s ethos – were also the themes of the day. “Seventy percent of the Philippines doesn't have access to banking,” Amanda Cassatt, founder of Serotonin, said during a talk on Founder Journeys. “Blockchain has found a product market fit as a transport layer for money.”
Journeying beyond centralized governments and banking systems has been at the heart of web3 since Bitcoin did become decentralized.
Fellow ‘Founder Journey’ panelist Alisia Painter – co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the Bitcoin-native DeFi ecosystem, Botanix Labs – detailed a hackathon held at the Africa Bitcoin conference. Participants explored decentralized solutions for citizens in countries whose leaders steal or mismanage resources – attempts to stave off economic turmoil if fiat currencies fail, she said.
The technocracy, too, was vilified as another needs-to-be-decentralized monolith – addressed with particular urgency as millions onboard centralized consumer AI tools. “Everything I feed into AI that’s built by big tech is owned by big tech,” said Emma Peretti, senior growth manager at DFINITY, in a panel on decentralizing AI.
“We would love the big tech companies to use open protocols,” said Eva Beylin, director at The Graph. “Imagine if there was a ChatGPT experience on every dApp.”
Read more: ‘Crypto Doula’ Maggie Love’s Mission to Make Web3 More Female
Imagine that indeed, and while progress is being made, web3 builders can never move as fast as their web2 counterparts. “It feels like we’re trying to catch this runaway train,” said Audrey Akwenye, chief technical officer at Spartan Labs. “AI needs decentralization because we can’t allow a couple companies to control something that will be such a huge part of our everyday lives.”
That logic rings true in most industries – indeed in most corners of life.
In a fireside with Christina Beltramini, the head of growth at Lens Protocol, the artist Latashá shared her web3 journey, which was largely motivated by frustration with the traditional music industry. “You've probably heard how brutal [the music industry] is for women,” she said, “especially if you’re a woman rapper.”
Bouts of depression and a natural penchant for experimentation led her to web3. During the pandemic, she blazed trails for on-chain music, and today she champions the tech’s potential to “heal money wounds that artists have been having for centuries.”
“In web3 I made what I could’ve made through a record deal without giving away the rights to any of my masters,” she said. “What I’m manifesting is labels getting off artists’ backs to use web3. Web3 is the future, so if they don’t, we’re going to see the downfall of the music industry.”
It’s a sentiment that echoes Beltramini during our chat last year for a profile on Lens Protocol. “The music industry is going to ignore [web3] for as long as possible,” she told me, “because they're so burnt from technology and they're so scared of the unknown.”
Reticence opens the door to Lens and other decentralized social projects, whose promises of transparency, audience ownership and data portability will appeal to artists long plagued by rent-seeking intermediaries.
“[On Twitter and Instagram], I’m giving away my data to these companies and they’re benefiting off of me,” Latashá said. “Artists are creating the new Internet, so I believe artists should get paid for building that Internet.”
Before leaving the stage, the artist fielded audience questions on how to engage with web3. “Diversify your community,” she said, and ensure you’re not just interacting with “crypto bros.” And to the question of how to start your journey, she said: never neglect “self-care.”
Throughout the day, self-care was a focal point. There was a workshop on gua sha – a traditional Chinese face massage – and Lori Ann Ferreri, founder of ON AIR, guided us in a stretching session. “Connect with what’s on the inside,” she said, “because it has a huge effect on what we put into the world.”
Amidst the crypto bro pathology, SheFi is a breath of fresh air. And the SheFi Summit was one of the most grounded, pragmatic and inspiring crypto events I’ve attended. All tickets were reimbursable if you showed up – purchases were staked to hold a spot. Shilling was minimal, and when done was aligned with impact and care – the principles we need to manifest for a more equitable on-chain space.
Diverse across age, ethnicity, experience levels and socioeconomics, the cadre of SheFi speakers spoke as representatives of a collective movement. They celebrated one another, crediting other women and communities that have helped them on their journey.
There will always be those who flock to crypto – and other nascent spaces – to plant flags, get rich and perpetuate whatever prevailing regime in which they have power and privilege. If we want to dismantle that – and we should – we need decentralization to transcend the technology and be reflected in the builders.
Because despite the permissionless nature of blockchain, decentralization is not inevitable. Nothing starts decentralized, and if the privileged aren’t willing to forgo some of the advantages they’ve earned via centralized power structures, we won’t end there, either.