In 2018, after visiting the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Olayinka Odeniran formed the Black Women Blockchain Council (BWBC).
Only three of the 88 speakers at the event were women, with the majority of the attendees being white men. “Networking party” was conducted in a strip club, where some women were uncomfortable and disappointed.
According to Odeniran, “women in the space simply said that they had enough.” In place of whining, we chose to form our own community among one another.
As exciting as it was for me to develop a network of women in crypto, “I started to look around, and I was seeing just a few people that look like me.” As a result, she says, “I began actively searching out other Black women working in this field. Since then, Odeniran has made a significant investment in the BWBC, which aims to increase the number of Black women working in IT. Global benefit LLC provides educational tools for Black women around the world who want to learn about blockchain and become wealthy.
Black Women Blockchain Council founder Olayinka Odeniran (BWBC).
Olayinka Odeniran has provided this information for us.
To help train half a million Black women as blockchain coders by 2030, the BWBC teamed up with Ethereum software company ConsenSys in July 2021. According to Odeniran, the programme will become live in the third quarter of 2022.
“We want to demonstrate representation and show that this environment is not simply male dominated,” she explains. In this, there are a lot more ladies than guys. “We’re accomplishing a lot.”
This isn’t just Odeniran’s mission. A number of other women-led crypto organisations have sprung up recently, including the BWBC. In addition to the Komorebi Collective, there are many additional non-profit groups like Women in Blockchain and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs).
In my opinion, it’s a problem to focus on women who are already in the field.
As a financial firm’s top compliance officer, Odeniran was introduced to bitcoin in 2016. It wasn’t until she did some research and read its white paper that Odeniran became convinced that blockchain might benefit the black community. “I thought that, as a woman in the Black community, blockchain was something that could absolutely help us,” she says.
When it comes to preventing currency devaluation and fraud, having a way to track transactions on the blockchain is critical, especially in developing countries like Africa.
WiB’s Founder, Manasi Vora, Would Agree
After investigating monetary policy in 2016, Vora came across bitcoin. Her interest in the topic arose as a result of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to prohibit the majority of India’s currency notes, which had the effect of depreciating the rupee nearly immediately.
When it came to the Indian economy, that “sent a lot of shockwaves” “The marginalised population was the most affected. As a result, I began thinking about money for the first time.”
After that, she went into the “rabbit hole” of bitcoin. In spite of her optimism, Vora was sometimes the only female in a room of hundreds.