(In the picture, second from right)
Crypto talks endlessly about “mass adoption,” but almost never about the people who will actually drive it. We measure users, wallets, and on-chain activity, yet ignore the most reliable predictor of whether a technology crosses into the mainstream: whether women are part of the story. If half the world can’t see themselves in what we’re building, we’re not building an adoption curve—we’re building a cul-de-sac.
This realization hit me sharply when I was invited to speak at SheFi, the largest program dedicated to increasing women’s participation in Web3. My talk was about what it means to be “inside the crypto bubble,” a phrase we use often but rarely unpack. I expected the usual nods, the standard circuit reactions. Instead, what happened after the session surprised me. Women came up to me—some founders, some professionals, some completely new to crypto—and said the ideas resonated with them in ways they hadn’t expected. It wasn’t because I simplified anything. It was because I named something they had felt for a long time: that crypto still speaks a language they were never taught.
(Speaking at Sanctum, a community for accelerating gender equality in web3)
At SheFi, I found myself rethinking what inclusion actually means in this industry. We say we want mass adoption, but we design our conversations for the same people, in the same demographics, in the same locations. The crypto bubble today is loud, fast, male, and Western. It rewards technical fluency but undervalues personal experience. It demands allegiance to jargon rather than curiosity about impact. And yet, the people who stand to gain the most from decentralized technologies are often the ones least represented in these rooms. Women in India navigating financial dependence. Young builders in Nairobi and Dhaka searching for global opportunity. Women in Latin America managing unstable economies and inflation. These are the users whose lives could be improved by crypto long before the billionaires who currently dominate its conferences.
While speaking at SheFi, I shared something personal: that I am a founder and marketer in the space, but I am also a woman from India who started from nothing. Crypto gave me access—real, material access. It allowed me to build a company in Dubai, live in New York, and participate in a global economy that once felt unreachable. It valued my skills over my origin, and my curiosity over traditional hierarchies. That is the story of adoption. Not the million-dollar mints or the L2 benchmarks, but the ability for someone like me to reroute her life because of a technology that expands opportunity.
Women respond to stories like this not because they are inspirational, but because they are practical. They’re about rent, savings, choice, and mobility. They make crypto legible. And legibility—not hype—is what creates adoption. When I spoke at SheFi, what resonated most was not a technical insight, but a framing: that storytelling is the most underrated on-ramp in this industry. Not explanatory storytelling, but inclusive storytelling—the kind that bridges this deeply technical world with the lived realities of the people it claims to empower.
If mass adoption is truly the goal, women cannot be an afterthought. Women are the primary financial decision-makers in households across the world. They drive consumer adoption across every major technological shift—from mobile banking to e-commerce to social platforms. Crypto will be no different. The industry simply cannot scale without women shaping, questioning, and participating in the narrative.
What SheFi Berlin reminded me is that adoption isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a storytelling problem, an accessibility problem, and a representation problem. It’s about whether the people crypto was built for can see themselves inside the movement. Mass adoption will not happen because we build better products. It will happen because we build better bridges.
Speaking at SheFi didn’t just give me a stage; it gave me clarity. If we want this industry to grow, the question isn’t just “Who is not here?”
The real question is: “What are we doing to make sure they can walk in?”
About the Author: Mia P is the founder and CEO of Unhashed, a Web3 growth and GTM studio helping Web3 protocols communicate clearly. She speaks globally on storytelling, inclusion, and the future of crypto marketing. Her work focuses on turning complex technology into narratives people can trust and adopt. And her work has spoken for Moonpay, Ledger, Thirdweb, Quicknode, and many other big names in the industry.
