Crypto has been an industry predominantly dominated by white men, especially from developed countries. That’s just a fact for anyone with eyes. So, it didn’t start by being pretty diverse or inclusive, even if the whole gist of decentralization and self-custodial money was to include everyone or as many people as possible. Luckily, things have improved over the years, but diversity and inclusion in crypto still seem to be a work in progress.
Now, to be fair, a lot of people participating here tend to be anonymous and therefore we know close to nothing about their “diversity stats” —ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, etc.
Let’s start with some stats to check how that’s going so far.
Current landscape
Or as current as the stats and reports have allowed us to know. Likely, the first thing that stands out about this topic is the gender gap in crypto. According to
Similar reports are all over the industry, but almost always show the same gender gap. It’s not the only type of statistic worth noting for diversity purposes, though. This is an interesting one: as discovered by
Age is also a factor to consider in adoption and general inclusion in crypto. As shown
Women and Minorities in Crypto
If we scrutinize the stats above, we can conclude that crypto adoption is more likely in people who have been most excluded from traditional financial services, or whose countries have certain monetary issues or limitations. However, differences in age and gender can’t be fully explained by it.
On the other hand, crypto founders, leaders, and top employees are still mostly white men, all over the world. According to another study by
All of this doesn’t mean that minorities can only participate as silent crypto adopters. There are numerous decentralized projects and protocols founded and managed by minorities, and that have been built to support minorities too.
Some Initiatives
Black individuals and communities, for instance, have developed numerous crypto projects to address economic inequality and empower themselves.
AthenaDAO focuses on women’s health research and education, while Crypto Tech Women empowers women in tech through education and advisorship programs. The Queer Museum of Digital Art supports queer artists, and the Yes Queen Club promotes diversity in the crypto world with proceeds supporting inclusion initiatives. SheFi offers crypto education to women and non-binary individuals, and the NGO Diversity in Blockchain is dedicated to ensuring equal participation in the crypto industry.
What’s left to do?
Well, decentralized protocols don’t care about who you are, where are you from, or what are your current circumstances. They’re mostly automatic systems designed to include everyone, so we are able to use them for whatever (harmless thing) we want. The one inclusion-related thing we must still worry about in crypto is the potential censorship of these systems, be it by governments, by companies, or by any other centralized player.
That’s why we should use the most decentralized and censorship-resistant protocols. On Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example, large mining pools or nodes controlled by a few entities can potentially influence transaction processing and their inclusion into the blockchain. Additionally, infrastructure providers like major exchanges and wallet services can become points of centralization, impacting the network's overall decentralization and susceptibility to censorship.
This design ensures that Obyte is free from domination and censorship, providing a secure and accessible platform for anyone worldwide to store and transfer value, and even to build new Dapps, DAOs, or any other inclusive project. Features like customized tokens, conditional payments, textcoins, chatbots, and
Featured Vector Image by upklyak /