Attendees of the Boys’ Club event show off their temporary tattoos. “Whether we like it or not, it’s happening,” the woman with the microphone is saying. “I know it feels really fringey right now, but in, like, three minutes we’re going to be living in this world.”
I’m one of about a hundred women in their 20s and early 30s with the kind of professionally cool haircuts you can only get at salons with big Instagram followings, in a dimly lit, rather swanky hotel bar in Manhattan. We are here to learn about the looming future of which our host speaks, the future that is paved with blockchain, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and, maybe, riches. Right now it is dominated almost entirely by men , but, we’re told, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
The woman with the microphone is Deana Burke, the 37-year-old co-founder of Boys Club , one of a handful of startups organized around the concept of bringing more women and nonbinary people into this space, which I’ll broadly refer to as Web3, or the still nebulously defined “next phase” of the internet. It’s the version of the internet that comes after the Facebooks and the Googles, the one where you, the user, can theoretically own your data — your art, your tweets, your selfies — and earn money from them. The infrastructure of Web3 runs on something called blockchain that in theory allows for a perfectly transparent, completely public record of every transaction that happens on the internet (here is a much more in-depth explainer ). As you are likely aware, it is also controversial . The crowd chats before the panel discussion begins. The real reason we are all in this bar, though, is because when people talk about Web3 and blockchain and NFTs, what they are really talking about is money, and the possibilities of making a lot of it in a short amount of time. Over the past several years, and particularly during the pandemic, cryptocurrency has gone from a relatively niche interest among tech bros to, many have argued, the Great Way Forward. (Many have also argued the opposite , and we’ll get to that.) The problem is that most of the crypto success stories the media tends to repeat are from men who, by all accounts, were already rich.
“We’re not really trying to convince people about crypto or NFTs,” explains Burke, who has worked in the crypto space since 2017 and met her co-founder Natasha Hoskins, 29, at a previous job at IndieGoGo. Instead, they want Boys Club to act as a “soft landing” for women who are curious about the space and need somewhere to ask questions. “One thing that makes us different from other crypto communities I’ve been involved with is that the people who are coming to Boys Club are, like, poets, florists, academics,” she adds. ”They’re trying to figure out how their acupuncture business could move into this Web3 world.”
The community exists mostly, like the vast majority of Web3 groups, on Discord, where its 800 members discuss topics in chats called things like “no dumb questions,” “spam watch,” and “DAO daddies.” One recent topic in the latter chat: How to know if you’re working with someone who’s actually qualified if you only know their Discord handle.
You’ll quickly learn there are a lot of acronyms in this space; DAO, for instance, stands for “ decentralized autonomous organization ” and is pronounced like it’s spelled. Think of DAOs like companies where each person involved has a certain amount of shares and therefore voting power to make decisions on what the DAO will do, except it’s all based on crypto and the blockchain. Boys Club itself is in the process of becoming a DAO through an accelerator called Seed Club, and Hoskins and Burke are exploring what the organization could become. A tool for recruiting women in Web3? A startup investment firm? “The community-first mentality is very crypto,” explains Hoskins. “The currency that is the most valuable is the people you have in your Discord.” Boys Club founders Natasha Hoskins (left) and Deana Burke. These are the same people at the Manhattan event, where there are free temporary tattoos that say “Rich Bitch” (the B is a play on the bitcoin logo) and “Lil Degen” (short for “degenerate,” a common slang for crypto traders and gamblers). On the cocktail rounds sit free sponsor-supplied hats from Public.com that say “INVEST” in all caps; the stated dress code for the evening is Euphoria meets […]
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