Crypto isn’t just for bros: encounter the mother joining the market

In October, Sarah Monson absorbed that Facebook was swapping its name to Meta and replacing its name called the Metaverse, a hypnotic virtual world that didn’t yet survive, but the company said would one day conquer the internet. Monson, a 44-year-old advertising writer, and mother who recently shifted to Hawaii found the news disturbing.

“I was like, oh my God, we are all going to be dragged into this creepy metaverse by Mark Zuckerberg, whether we like it or not, and have no say in it,” she said in an interview last week at NFT LA, a digital currency conference in downtown Los Angeles.

Monson believed her 6-year-old daughter would meet some version of the metaverse in the future and she have to be prepared. She clear cut the best thing to do was to absorb the technologies that many supporters of the metaverse said would support it, including cryptocurrencies and NFTs, or non-refundable tokens.

“My whole point was, I want to educate myself,” Monson said. She also didn’t want to leave out what was looking to her like another major technologies boom. “I lived in Seattle during the dot com bubble and I had no voice or power to do anything,” she said.

Monson began investing in digital currency several years ago. But she consumed the past five months diving into the market headlong, hearing to NFT interviews, joining Discord servers, and connecting with other mothers on Twitter. She is now getting ready to start her very first NFT art collection, which she dubbed The Latchkey Kids, a recommendation to members of her generation born in the 1970s and ’80s. On another day of NFT LA, she put on a face mask and T-shirt printed with the colorful cartoon goats she helped design for the project.

While youthful, male Americans are more likely to speak they have listened a lot about cryptocurrencies, and a small but growing number of mothers, like Monson, are getting involved in the industry. For them, the post of investing in crypto can be higher. Most of the six mothers broadcasted for this article said that they hoped crypto and NFTs would meaningfully change the financial security of their families for generations to come. They said they felt their perspective was different from that of the “crypto bros” often associated with the market.

“With more and more parents entering this space, we have a different mindset,” said Olayinka Odeniran, the creator of the Black Women Blockchain Council, a company that helps Black women pursue careers in the blockchain and fintech industries, who has a 12-year-old daughter. “Our approach is different from the single guys or girls who are solely here just to invest. We’re here really because we want to leave something for our family and we want them to be able to participate in our space.”

Odeniran and other mothers like her speak for the minority of the crypto industry. Only 13 percent of American women in their 30s and 40s say they have invested in, traded on cryptocurrencies, set side by side with 43 percent of men in their late teens and 20s, according to a Pew Research Center study published in November. All over, twice as many men invest in digital currency as women, a CNBC observation found.

The absence of women is so notified that it is often the subject of jokes. During the interview Monson attended, comedian Kristin Key mused on stage that perhaps NFT stands for “no females today.” (The audience didn’t laugh.)

But now, amid another rising market, a new wave of female-themed organizations have joined that say they want to encourage more women to participate in crypto.

Deana Burke, a mother of two kids of age 5 and a co-founder of Boys Club, a crypto collective designed for women and non-binary people, said there is more excitement about entering the industry among women than when she first joined a few years ago.

“I couldn’t get anyone to care,” said Burke. “But there’s now this ambient curiosity.”