A cloud of bro culture surrounds crypto-trading space, with Twitter spats, Reddit threads and meme wars dictating media coverage and largely reflecting the male-dominated world of new finance.

But women aren’t idly watching this evolving market. In fact, they are playing an increasingly active role as investors, founders, media entrepreneurs, educators and even meme enthusiasts.

A recent survey conducted by University of Chicago researchers found the crypto boom is opening up opportunities for more diverse investors, including women and people of color. Over the past year, the number of female crypto traders has been growing across several cryptocurrency exchanges and online brokerage firms, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The number of female crypto traders on eToro has doubled in the U.S., but still makes up 20% of its total users. (Note: I’m a very inactive user of eToro but find it pretty useful, especially the discussion boards and traders who allow other users to copy their strategies.)

It’s always difficult to generalize about gender behaviors when it comes to money, but there are studies that show women spend more time researching their investments. As more young investors take charge of their financial future, the percentage of female traders and crypto investors, in particular, is likely to grow.

This may play out in female investors’ favor in the long term, as the world of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance remains in the early stages of development. 

“It’s like the early days of the Internet where there were many attempts, but a few key platforms that did survive and I could probably take a good guess on what will be here five to 10 years from now and what won’t,” Rahilla Zafar, an advisor at Fourth Revolution Capital, an alternative investment firm focused on blockchain technology, told me.

The mission of new financial platforms and offers also appear to resonate with female investors, as more financial institutions are taking female clients more seriously, unveiling products educating and engaging female customers more directly. Fidelity Investments, for example, launched Fidelity Spire App, a free app for financial planning, saving and investing.

“We understand that women and men have different needs when it comes to planning for life’s major moments and for the long term,” says Lorna Kapusta, Head of Women Investors and Customer Engagement at Fidelity Investments. “Recent events have certainly exacerbated this, as multiple Fidelity studies this year have shown.”

Since we’ve entered this new territory, a lot of crypto investors have become educators, and have launched their own media platforms to teach more investors and customers what DeFi is all about.

Camila Russo, who is a former Bloomberg journalist and author of The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum,  has launched The Defiant, a media platform that includes a Substack-based newsletter, a podcast and a range of guides on how to get started.

Russo shared a list with me of key steps to take before “going down the crypto rabbit hole”. I couldn’t agree more with her, so I’m including it here in full:

• The obvious one and how you would start to research any topic: Google the key terms and read the primary material. 

• Follow specialized newsletters to keep up-to-date with the latest news, trends and narratives. 

• Listen to crypto podcasts to learn from investors and founders in the space. 

• Get on Twitter. Most of the conversation and announcements happen on Twitter (aka crypto Twitter) so follow all the top crypto accounts and make it a habit to scroll through the site throughout the day. 

• To follow specific projects, get on their Discord group chat app. DeFi projects have open Discord servers where teams answer questions, make announcements and their users can interact.
  

As any market, decentralized finance has elements of a carnival with crypto pockets of TikTok merging with the #witchtok and #manifesting affirmations crowds.

Rachel Cook, the founder of SEEDS, which provides free training on how to trade crypto, allows its users to help someone in need. On her TikTok account @TranscendCapitalism, she combines insights on different cryptocurrencies like Cardano with reflections on her past lives.

Not all women involved in crypto investing necessarily have the best intentions in mind. There are already plenty of cautionary tales like the story Dr. Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian crypto Ponzi schemer who has been charged with wire fraud, security fraud and money laundering by the U.S. authorities in 2019. (BBC produced a great podcast about the saga called The Missing Cryptoqueen)

Still, there is a growing number of female creators on social media and offline specializing in crypto education or community-building in response to growing interest.

The founders of Hot Crypto Girls Twitter and Instagram pages had a similar idea, creating an online community to help educate more women about crypto. They launched the accounts in June 2021 and were surprised by how many people reached out to them online, in person or recognized the name despite their modest number of followers on Twitter and Instagram.

“It's a space that a lot of women like, historically haven't been very well-represented,” says Rajya Atluri, a crypto enthusiast and entrepreneur who’s working on a separate startup in non-crypto space and has a makeup-focused TikTok account with over 45,000 followers. “What if we could use memes and humor on Twitter to get more women interested in crypto?”

For many female investors, this is just the beginning and a growing number of crypto enthusiasts are putting in the time to learn and become savvier investors.

“This ecosystem is about decentralization and equality, and the leaders in the space building this tech aren’t doing it for cash grabs or quick get-rich things,” Zafar says.