A recent report by global cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin, Journey into Web 3 – A Global Study on the Future of Work, explores professional engagement in the decentralised internet sector.
The report highlights that female Web3 professionals are generally more active career-wise than their male counterparts, unlike surveyed female Web3 enthusiasts, who are less prone to making Web3 investments than their male counterparts.
Forty-nine percent of female Web3 professionals have worked part-time or as freelancers in Web3-related industries, and 33% have worked full-time. Although 27% of female Web3 professionals have been involved in starting Web3-related projects or businesses, the share is still lower than their male Web3 professionals, of whom 41% are self-reported Web3 entrepreneurs. 33% of female Web3 professionals have worked as engineers or developers in the industry, the same as their male counterparts. Only 22% of women Web3 enthusiasts have expressed interest in the same function.
According to the report, male dominated Web3 workplaces erect challenges for women, 33% of whom mentioned the “bro” culture of Web3 as an impediment. The lack of proper educational resources was also a key barrier for women to engage in Web3. Regardless of challenges, 60% of female professionals recognise their unique value in facilitating better culture in Web3 workplaces and communities.
Despite these challenges, women are making their mark in the Web3 space in India as developers and entrepreneurs.
Here are 5 women riding the Web3 wave, and hoping to make a difference.
Tarusha Mittal, OroPocket
In 2013, Tarusha Mittal and her childhood friend Mohit Madan launched an Ethereum exchange, ethx.co, one of the earliest in India.
In 2018, when the Reserve Bank of India banned banks from supporting crypto transactions, the company had two choices – move operations abroad or shut down. They hadn’t raised money yet, so the latter could be an expensive option. Instead, they decided to pivot by building a fintech app that recorded transactions on blockchain.
They started Delhi-based OroPocket, a startup that allows users to diversify their portfolios beyond traditional assets by investing in multiple digital assets such as digital gold and silver.
It also provides customers with financial services on top of these investments, helping make the assets liquid. The 45+ member startup maintains reserves of gold and silver which are allocated to a user when they purchase it digitally. Ownership and future transactions are all recorded on the Ethereum, Tezos, and Polygon blockchains. It also makes revenue from two other products–OpenDefi, a decentralised finance (DeFi) product which is a mix of real world and synthetic assets (tokenised derivatives) and UniFarm – a farming solution where blockchain projects come together to create a reward pool.
Shilpa Karkeraa, Myraa Technologies
Shilpa Karkeraa is the Founder and CEO of Myraa Technologies, an AI and Blockchain solutions and products company.
Myraa has key offerings, which address three separate problem areas. These include: Myraa Lens–an AI based visual inspector for industrial automation. It automates manual work and quality checks that require visual supervision in factories using computer vision.
Myraa Blocks–A blockchain awareness programme where the company works with financial institutions, factories, and communities to bring awareness to why we need decentralised finance, shared ledgers for transparency, and smart contracts that enable fair trade.
Myraa Superstar–The purpose of this product is to drive inclusion and diversity through an unbiased AI-driven tool to clone superstars in your organisation. It clones the characteristics of your star employees and helps improve discovery of talent. It also aids in eliminating human biases that occur during filtering resumes and enabling similarity as a measuring metric.
Niveda Harishankar & Madhumitha Harishankar, Nume Crypto
With product-intensive backgrounds, sisters Niveda and Madhumitha Harishankar co-founded Nume Crypto last year to build a real-time, pay-as-you-go model for mobile data usage.
Prior to starting up, Niveda worked as a UX designer at Amazon, where she was one of the product owners for the Alexa-Cortana integration and designed new features for Kindle. Before completing her doctoral studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021, Madhumitha was a software engineer at Amazon Web Services.
Nume Crypto is a near zero-cost crypto payment gateway that processes cryptocurrency payments (ETH and ERC-20 tokens, to begin with) powered by its new L2 scaling protocol. At the crux of Nume Crypto’s offering is the aim to make cryptocurrency transactions more economical. The platform is building an application to bring crypto to the masses. The protocol is centered around reducing the processing costs.
Suruchi Gupta, GIANT Protocol
In 2018, Suruchi Gupta stumbled upon blockchain and smart contracts and built Wificoin (now GIANT Connect), a blockchain-based project that provides a secure and reliable internet connection. Both ShareG and Wificoin led to the formation of GIANT Protocol in 2021, which was launched in January 2022.
GIANT (Global Internet Access Network Token) Protocol is a Web 3 protocol to decentralise and democratise access to the internet and financial services.
The tokenised bandwidth platform will partner with telecommunication companies and connectivity providers in 120 countries to create a decentralised connectivity economy, allowing anyone with a mobile phone to participate. Essentially, it allows anyone with a mobile phone to access the internet and become an owner by simply going online.
