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Women in Web3: The Super Female Power of Blockchain

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Women CEOs account for only 6.4% of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States. Bias and stereotypes affect everyone, especially women.

Original title: "Women in Web3: The Super Female Power of Blockchain"

Original author: Jayde zhang, Windy34, Buidler DAO

On the Fortune 500 list in the United States, female CEOs account for only 6.4%. The business world recorded in the flash is a photo of all board members in suits, a solid alliance between the masculinity of the fraternity at the wine table, and a male programmer geek wearing a plaid shirt in Hollywood movies. Prejudice and stereotypes affect everyone, especially women.

In "Male Domination", Bourdieu wrote that "women are a situation". Business technology and culture are developing rapidly, and the situation is changing, but in the broad technology field represented by web3, the manifestation of women's power still requires us to carry a magnifying glass and look for it carefully.

But the dissatisfaction in front of us can also become the first line of poetry in front of us. To this end, Buidler DAO has found three outstanding women in the Web3 world who are extremely powerful - hoping to make them the subject of the narrative, showing "their" efforts, "their" achievements, and "their" dreams.

From their exploration of the Siddhartha path, we can infinitely extend our imagination of the present and see the infinite possibilities of our future; following their thinking and practice, we can jointly break the stereotyped default radical assumptions about success, and see and give life itself a concrete answer.

Know her name

01/ Cheryl Liu

Co-founder of Deeper Network, PhD student in the US with full scholarship

Twitter: @deeper_network

02/ Maggie Wu

CEO & co-founder of Krypital Group and Galactic Holdings, 20 years of continuous entrepreneurship

Twitter: @MaggieWu_KG

03/ Lemon Lin

Co-founder & CMO of iZUMi Finance, first chairman of Zhejiang University Blockchain Club

Twitter: @Lemon.bit

Cheryl Liu

Although I know the secret of making money, I can't break through myself at a higher level. I hope to be a real entrepreneur, influence more people's lives, and bring fundamental changes to everyone.

The more old-fashioned concept is that women should be more conservative. Girls will consider more details, whether it is leadership, cognition, execution, or the ability to connect people.

The transformation journey from a small town test-taker to a course test-taker

In 2018, I immigrated from the United States to Vancouver. In that era, fewer people went abroad, and I received a full scholarship from China to study for a doctorate in the United States. A full scholarship also means that tuition and living expenses can be covered, which is considered a job. I have been influenced by several teachers who are important to me since I was a child. They allowed me to struggle from a small city, go abroad with a full scholarship with my own ability, stay in the United States, start a business, and get to where I am today...

Why did you enter the blockchain industry at an early stage? This comes from my keen sense of smell, insight and business awareness since childhood.

My family doesn't actually have any business genes, but I tried to do what I could very early. Without affecting my studies, I started saving the little pocket money my parents gave me in elementary school, reselling small commodities at night markets to make a profit, and then opening an online store. As a student, I can only do so much, but I was already very financially independent when I was in college. At that time, there were no smartphones, only flip phones like Motorola and Nokia, and a 300,000-megapixel camera was a cool feature. At that time, when a new generation of mobile phones came out, I bought one for each of my parents. It felt great to improve the family's living standards. These inconspicuous experiences have allowed me to maintain my deep thinking and summarizing abilities among my peers, constantly make small-cost trials and errors, go to cutting-edge fields and constantly try new opportunities, which is very critical for me to enter the industry early and choose the right track.

After 2015, I did not continue on the path of academic research because I saw the huge potential and future of the blockchain industry. At that time, some friends around me started mining, and I quickly sensed this opportunity. From the earliest purchase of Bitcoin mining machines and computing power, to participating in Ethereum mining, to purchasing graphics cards, self-learning to assemble machines with multiple graphics cards, to establishing mining farms and operation and maintenance management, etc. I can say that I entered this industry through mining. And from 2015 to 2018, I started to lead my team to do blockchain service companies and legal companies. In the industry where new projects are springing up like mushrooms after rain, I chose to be a "water delivery worker."

5 years, 100 million nodes, building a bridge from Web2 to Web3

In 2018, at a blockchain industry conference, I met Russell Liu, who is now the technical partner of Deeper Network. He firmly said that he would build the next generation of trusted Internet and let users have 100% of their own data sovereignty, allowing users to decide what to see, what not to see, what to do, and what not to do. At that time, he demonstrated to me some of the functions that he had developed in the network security operating system, including enterprise-level firewalls and some other network security functions. These were not only extremely innovative at the time, but no one could achieve them today, four years later.

Operating system development is a big project. Russell's team is small, but it has made a relatively complete visual network security operating system, which can provide users with real seven-layer enterprise-level network security services. It can be seen that he has super R&D capabilities, foresight and leadership, and is a rare top technical genius and creator in Silicon Valley. I have seen a lot of projects in the industry, but the common feeling I get is that the landing attributes are not strong. Can the real easy-to-use blockchain technology be realized? Can it be popularized to thousands of households? Is it a high-frequency and rigid application scenario for everyone? - There is a question mark. I have always attached great importance to business logic and business model.

What impressed me about Deeper Network is its powerful killer application. Regardless of whether ordinary Internet users understand Web3 or what blockchain is, users need a product or service, and will naturally become blockchain users or Web3 users.

Before 2018, it took me ten years to finally learn to create economic value with existing cognition and mature business models, but people are often like this, because you already know what the key to making money is, but you can't break through yourself to become a more creative person. So at that time, I felt that I had to break through myself and use hard-core technology that can truly change human beings and make human life more convenient and comfortable to influence the world; to truly be an entrepreneur and build a unicorn company with a strong ecosystem.

Speculative things are unlikely to change the world, so we should focus on creating killer applications

When it comes to infrastructure, the concepts that come to people's minds instinctively are: large investment, low return, long cycle, and thankless effort.

Deeper is building the Web3 infrastructure ecosystem. It needs to distribute hardware products such as infrastructure to thousands of households, build a backbone network, and provide users with killer features such as enterprise-level firewalls, privacy protection, and ad removal, and then create the largest decentralized edge computing platform. All other ecological services are based on our backbone network, and on this basis, a certain network effect is formed, and the network, storage, and computing are truly integrated together - so it is actually quite challenging. Even so, Deeper Connect products, that is, the hardware node devices on our network, can be in the top ten of millions of products on the mainstream platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo in terms of long-term popularity and sales, and even as the only Web3 product on these mainstream crowdfunding platforms, it repeatedly breaks history and creates records.

If the purpose of all Web3 participants is speculation, then Web3 will never have a mainstream application that affects the world. I am doing this for a long time with the mentality of doing business, with a unit of ten years as a cycle. We are now in a period of rapid development, from 80,000 valid nodes to the next Milestone - 1 million nodes to truly form our network effect and build the world's largest decentralized edge computing platform.

Any kind of technological product or technology, before it becomes accepted by the mainstream public and widely used, at least a sufficient number of people must really participate in it to complete the gap from niche, speculative adventurers to mainstream applications. Based on the global population, there are now 6 billion people, so all Web3 applications face a market of 1 billion users. We need to produce killer applications that these 1 billion users find it difficult to refuse to use.

We all know that launching a rocket is difficult and small companies can't do it. But there are always people who want to do such things, because this thing is meaningful to mankind and society, so there are always people who do it. I hope that Deeper Network can solve the real problems faced by every Web2 Internet user, provide killer applications, and bring users to the world of Web3 without realizing it, so as to truly cross the gap from Web2 to Web3.

The old custom believes that women should be conservative, but girls actually have more details when starting a business

There are more men in the business startup environment now. The entrepreneurial crowd I have been involved in over the years is basically dominated by men. As a female entrepreneur, I don’t think that girls themselves are naturally worse than boys in terms of ideas or execution. There are some old-fashioned ideas in society that believe that women should be more conservative. But girls who start their own businesses may consider more details than boys, and they can also accumulate their own experience and cognition. The leadership, cognitive ability, execution ability, and the ability to find people to connect with are not a problem.

But the bear market is the time for everyone to think deeply and do things steadily. Churchill once said, "Don't waste a crisis." There is an old Chinese saying, "Seek benevolence and you will get benevolence." In the West, it is called the law of attraction. As long as you believe in yourself and start from small things, you will definitely get what you deserve one day.

Image source: Cheryl Liu Moments

Maggie Wu

I like new things and like to participate in things that no one has participated in; I also like challenges and often go to be the first person to try new things. Now I not only want to be the first, but also want to be the number one.

I never consider gender at work. I never agree with "because you are a woman, so you should be like this". To me, everyone is the same, regardless of gender or race, everyone is equal...

A leap of faith, from traditional Internet financial investment to the establishment of Web3 VC

I studied English language and literature at Xiamen University. I went to the United States in 2005, and it has been 20 years since I started my business in 2002. In the 2008 economic crisis, I began to dabble in more investments, and before that I mainly focused on traditional industries. I started paying attention to Bitcoin in 2016 and studied the white paper very carefully, so I developed a strong interest in the new form of financial Internet. The first time I bought Bitcoin was on Coinbase, and I was a novice at that time.

The digital currency trading market is more attractive to me because it operates 24 hours a day. I started by doing simple transactions on Coinbase, and later I started to try to operate more complex derivatives on major trading platforms, and gradually became a professional trader. After taking the first step, my research became more and more in-depth, and I was also one of the first people to take blockchain courses at MIT Sloan.

When the ICO boom came at the end of 2017, my partners and I decided to formally establish a venture capital fund specifically for the blockchain field - Kypital Group. At the beginning, it was our own funds. At that time, we invested a lot with enthusiasm. Later, at the end of 2018, the industry quickly entered a bear market. This was also the first time we experienced a bear market in the blockchain industry, and we were also taught a profound lesson. A blessing in disguise... Because the great waves will make the industry more mature.

Since the decision to start raising funds, the whole team has always maintained confidence in the future and thought about continuing to persevere in this industry. From 2019 to 2021, we have successively invested in many DeFi, GameFi, and NFT related projects, such as Injective, Animoca Brands, Solv, Highstreet, deBridge, Blocto, etc. Many of these projects are listed on Binance and have good market performance. Some projects have also successfully completed several rounds of financing with higher valuations. Overall, the performance of our portfolios is still relatively excellent.

In addition to primary market investment, I also do secondary market transactions. Since the middle of last year, the entire market has actually seen a downward trend. We began to gradually withdraw in May. Now the industry has entered a bear market again, and it is expected to continue for some time. Although we are still looking at projects, the project screening will be much stricter than in the bull market. But it is also a good thing! Generally speaking, project parties are more down-to-earth and the valuation is more reasonable. In the bull market, the valuation of most projects has a lot of bubbles. At the same time, as investors, in addition to doing a good job of risk control, we also need to do a good job of post-investment management, and have the patience to accompany and help portfolios grow together in all aspects.

Witness the paradigm shift that the Internet is currently experiencing

Web2 and Web3 have been very popular topics in recent years. The future world is a world where Web2 (centralization) and Web3 (decentralization) coexist.

The traditional Internet is undergoing a paradigm shift, and blockchain and cryptocurrency are driving the progress of the entire industry. Why do we want to explore this process? The first is that it can solve the pain points encountered by the traditional Internet, and the second is that it contains huge development prospects. At present, the market value of the entire Web2 Internet is about 400 billion, while Web3 is only more than 20 billion. From the data, we can also clearly see the room for growth.

As we all know, Facebook changed its name to Meta in October last year and plans to invest 10 billion in VR, which means the importance of Metaverse in the future world. Research shows that people spend more and more time in the virtual world. The future virtual world will occupy all aspects of human life and work. This is undoubtedly full of great imagination and has become the direction of our key investment.

Fortunately, we are still in the early stages of the development of the entire industry today, and we will continue to explore in the world of Web3 in the future.

Make the impossible possible, climb the attic of female practitioners on Web3

I have been a very curious person since I was a child. I like new things and I have always liked challenges. I like to participate in things that no one has participated in, and I often go to be the first person to try them. Starting from curiosity, I may become more and more ambitious. Now I not only want to be the first, but also want to be the best.

Of course, I will only do everything with passion, which will always drive me to keep learning, and I have never stopped. Because I think human beings are too small and I am also ignorant, so I am full of curiosity and thirst for knowledge about the world, constantly increasing my understanding of the world, and enjoying the process.

I have been starting a business in the United States for many years. I know that Chinese or women, this society actually has some prejudices. But I am a person who refuses to admit defeat. As a Chinese woman starting a business in the United States, I really don’t want to be labeled with prejudice because of race or gender. No matter what the occasion, I don’t want people to say that because you are a woman, so this way, or use gender to hype. I never consider the issue of gender at work. To me, everyone is the same, regardless of gender or race, we are all equal...

But it's a bit contradictory. In my heart, I actually hope that women have a place in this industry. I once saw a list of "The Top 25 Cryptocurrency Industry Executives in 2022". Unfortunately, there is no woman on it. I hope that I will have the opportunity to work hard to reach the heights of the industry's leading companies as a Chinese female entrepreneur. At the same time, more women are encouraged to participate in our industry and not to set limits for themselves. You can become whoever you want to be, just do it and do your best!

I often go to Mexico for work. There is a very large feminist movement in Mexico every year. I just experienced one a few months ago. Many women participated in the march, and occasionally the sound of fire bombs could be heard. I was confused why the feminist movement in Mexico was so extreme? Later I learned that in the first quarter of 2020 alone, nearly a thousand women died in Mexico from various forms of murder, and most of the victims were young women in their teens and twenties.

Artist Elena Chauvet once held an exhibition called "Red Shoes" (Zapatos Rojos) in Juarez, Mexico. Every pair of red leather shoes on the street represents the story of real women being persecuted, and is a stand-in for hundreds of missing women in Juarez. In Mexico, the status of women is low to the dust. They are sexually abused, beaten to death and exposed in the wilderness. The red shoes represent the blood shed.

These real events that happened around me are very touching to me. I have to admit that there are still fewer opportunities for women in this society and industry. Although some behaviors of the feminist movement are too radical, in a specific environment, it still has certain positive social significance in helping women fight for more rights. In the future, I hope for equal rights. Women need a more fair environment.

Lemon Lin

Many girls, especially young girls, may doubt themselves in the process, or doubt whether what they do is meaningful?

I founded the Zhejiang University Blockchain Club before I graduated from college, and officially entered the blockchain industry as the first chairman and founder. The startup team I cooperated with at the beginning has now developed to have a great influence in the world. These make me feel very fulfilled. I am determined to continue in the industry for a long time.

The unlimited life from curator to chairman of the blockchain association

I studied Japanese in college, historical curator in graduate school, and took the intensive management course of Zhejiang University's Zhu Kezhen College. I studied a lot of things and had a liberal arts background.

I am a relatively contradictory sign. Capricorn rising, Cancer sun sign, so I want stability. But I may have some pursuits in my career. There will be a sense of self-consistency in change, and seek stability in liquidity.

In 2017, before I graduated, I founded the Zhejiang University Blockchain Club and officially entered the blockchain industry as the first chairman and founder. The singularity of this industry is mainly because I was influenced by many outstanding predecessors at Zhejiang University, who also led me into the blockchain track.

The market was good at that time, and we attracted a lot of people in our first recruitment and first event. We also attracted some well-known alliance chain partners founded by Zhejiang University alumni, such as Yunxiang, Quchain and Miyuan, which are now excellent companies in the field of compliant alliance chains. I started working with them in school and watched them build unicorn companies from scratch.

The more well-known customers at that time also included Bybit and BitMart, Canaan Creative, Bixin, Nervos, etc. When we first cooperated, many of them were still start-up teams, and now they have a great influence in the world. These make me feel very accomplished.

In addition, I organized a lot of activities in school. The club maintains a limited scale of 30 to 40 core developers every year, and regularly organizes technical sharing sessions for our members and students on Thursday. I also organize blockchain events and hackathons, which I am still doing now.

In 2018, because the club activities were very well organized, BTCU (China University Blockchain Technology Alliance) was organized. I am one of the core founders, and I met my current project partner in this organization. At that time, he was the founder and first chairman of the Tsinghua Blockchain Association. BTCU, a national organization, allowed me to meet many excellent developers. They came from Tsinghua, Peking University, ShanghaiTech University... ShanghaiTech University is a school that surprised me very much. It may not be as famous as other universities, but its developers are of very high quality, all of whom have a background in information engineering. BTCU also includes national developers from Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Central University of Finance and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, etc.

The maturity of the application ecosystem and the growth of developers complement each other

After graduation, I started a business called Bitrun, a brand for hackermasons. After experiencing the bull and bear markets, the public chain project in 2018 has been under development until now. In fact, it was quite difficult for us to do this in 2018. At that time, the blockchain environment was not so good, and everyone was hyping the concept of public chains. I did hackathons in the hope of allowing students or some developers to develop some DApps based on public chains. But the public chains in 2018 were not easy to use - hackathons were more like helping them debug than developing the public chain ecosystem, unlike now when DApps can be implemented, which was very difficult at the time.

There was a lot of resistance to doing this at the time, so I didn't stick to it, which is also something I regret. Because although the application ecosystem is not established, developers will actually continue to grow with the industry. If I stick to it, I can also get some of the final dividends of the industry. But what I did in 2018 allowed me to gain some benefits when the industry really matured. For example, most of the projects I am investing in now and my current project partners are from the group of developers and entrepreneurs I met in 2018.

Today's results, yesterday's causes. These are some of my insights into entrepreneurship.

Building a truly next-generation high-efficiency DEX

iZUMi Finance is a business I started in June 2021. I have experienced such a long time in the industry, and I don't want to waste my time on short-term projects, which are not particularly meaningful. I want to do something long-term. On-chain liquidity is a continuous demand, unlike some short-term projects, which need to chase waves of dynamic hot spots.

We judge that the on-chain liquidity track will get better and better. A step has been taken from centralized trading platforms to decentralized trading platforms. The flow on the decentralized trading chain, including on-chain applications and GameFi, will be more and more based on decentralized trading scenarios. I will not withdraw my game coins to the centralized trading platform every time to sell them, which is very troublesome. The on-chain trading scenario is always a rigid and underlying demand, and it will not change with market changes. This is a long-term growth track worth deepening.

My personal goal is to try my best to make iZUMi Finance a better brand with more users. In the long run, DEX is a platform infrastructure. If there is a platform and more traffic, it can become a very critical link for all projects to issue or trade on the chain. This is what we have to do in the long run, including now I am leading to establish an ecological fund from 0-1, in order to launch better assets, invest in early, contact some projects, and expand later. Raise funds from the outside to do more value investment or ecological investment.

Fearless of the stereotype of CMO, women should confidently show their advantages

The word CMO has been stigmatized, so in many cases I deliberately don't say that I am a CMO. But in fact, I am a co-founder and CMO, because CMO is actually just a position.

Women have certain advantages on social media. If you are versatile or have some special skills, or are smart and have your own unique understanding of the industry, these are all advantages. You don't have to say that you are particularly taboo, embarrassed to show yourself, or think it is shameful to use your special skills to attract fans. Confident people should not worry or worry.

Smart people should show their advantages and then make it your way of monetization, and also be careful not to let yourself be guided by stereotypes. Let everyone pay attention to and hear more of your actual achievements or ideas, so that everyone can change their impression of you. This is a smart approach. There is no need to be shy about saying that you don't want people to think of you this way, so you disdain to use this method to attract traffic. This is not necessary.

Some very outstanding women I know have done a lot in this industry. Song Ting is a very good representative of female power around me. She has done a lot of activities in New York. When we were in New York, we were always together to take care of each other. She is very determined, very determined in this industry, and very determined in her growth goals.

Many girls, especially young girls, may feel doubtful about themselves or doubt whether what they do is meaningful. Song Ting is a very determined person. She will also influence and infect others, and insist on preaching in the industry or her own track. In addition to contacting people in Web 3, she also communicates with many traditional collectors, artists, traditional entrepreneurs, and some people in the field of science and technology, such as people in the field of quantum computing, to spread the spirit of Web 3 and influence a wider world. This is really the power of women, especially self-reliance and independence!

The 2020 World Gender Gap Report shows that humanity is still 99.5 years away from true gender equality, and it is estimated that it will take 257 years for men and women to achieve income equality. Cyberspace is a public construction project that evolves through our collective actions. Collective action requires the sincere and valuable coexistence and win-win cooperation between people, genders, hearts and souls.

Buidler DAO is committed to creating a community that is not affected by gender privilege or prejudice, helping everyone enter the new world of Web3 without distinction. Web3 is a technological revolution and thought experiment that both women and men must be present in. This requires women to break their self-discipline, and more diverse and compatible structural changes to occur.

Web3 is gender-neutral, and you don't need to know whether you are a man or a woman on the way to being yourself. We hope to bravely push away the rough rock, and we sincerely hope that one day the world will no longer need to emphasize identity and recognition, and gender will no longer be the focus. Every individual is on the road to finding himself and reaching himself, and it is what it should be.

The future lies in today's spark, and good stories are happening....