Lisanne Drost has a one-line answer for why crypto needs more women, and it lands harder than any diversity slogan. “We’re now building a new financial future system,” she told me when we sat down at the Dutch Blockchain Week Summit. “And when it’s built only by half of the population, that’s not good.” That is the whole case in two sentences: a financial system designed by half the people is a worse product, not just an unfair one.
Drost is co-founder of the Crypto Women Collective, the other half of the story co-founder Laura Peijs told me a day earlier. She has worked in the crypto space for years, across tokenization and real-world assets, and the reason she sat across from me comes down to one blunt observation that the global ownership numbers back up. “There are no women. So that’s why I’m sitting here now.”
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Lisanne Drost co-founded the Crypto Women Collective and argues a financial system built by half the population is a worse product, not just an unfair one. |
| 2Women still make up only about 39 percent of global crypto owners, and they are roughly half as likely as men to plan a purchase, so the gap is widening rather than closing on its own. |
| 3The Collective runs two tracks, Explorer for newcomers and Builder for women already inside the industry, plus an open Speaker Index that surfaces hidden female experts. |
| 4The goal is concrete, not symbolic: a show rate for women of close to 40/60 or 50/50 at crypto events, with the first Adoption Index findings due after a community event on 8 July. |
Adding women is not the goal
The easy version of this mission is a headcount: get more women in the room and call it progress. Drost rejects that framing fast. Simply adding women, she agrees, does not make the space better on its own. The point is access.
“Our mission is to make the crypto space more accessible, more inclusive, and not that scary,” she said. “It resonates with women of all kinds. It doesn’t matter where you are in your crypto journey, if you’re a founder at a crypto company or just interested but don’t have any experience. The Women Collective is here for you.”
That is why the Collective built two tools at once: an open Speaker Index and a Crypto Adoption Index survey. Both chase the same missing thing. “Globally, there is no good picture of why women are not entering the space, and what holds them back,” Drost said. “We need to know what their incentives are, why they think it’s not for them.”
The image problem: “crypto boys flexing”
She has heard the assumption out loud, at birthday parties and from non-crypto friends, and she repeats it with a grimace. “They think I’m trading, or it’s the older crypto boys with the Rolex, flexing. They think that’s the space I’m working in. But it’s far from that.”
Changing that picture is half the job. The barrier is not only practical, it is in the head, and the consumer research shows the same gender gap across almost every crypto metric. “Many women have that thought, it’s not for me, I don’t feel it, it doesn’t resonate,” she said. “So we need to find a sweet spot. What are they holding back from, and what do they need to show up more, to own the place more?”
Her own entry shows where the loneliness comes from. “The first time I went to a crypto event, five or six years ago, there were two other women in the room. I thought, oh my god, is this the space I’m working in now? I felt really alone.”
Explorer and Builder
The Collective splits its work into two tracks. The Explorer track is for newcomers, the curious, the women who left “all the trading to their husband,” as she put it to me. “I think the first step is curiosity,” Drost said. “For women to be more financially independent, it’s important to know what’s going on. You don’t have to buy Bitcoin or other crypto. It’s more about owning, empowering, and lowering the barriers to entry.” That track runs crypto one-on-one: what it is, how it works, where you would even buy it.
The Builder track is for the women already inside, and it is mostly about networks. “It’s very important in this space to have your own network,” she said, “especially women empowering women, supporting women.” Some of the strongest experts, she has found, sit on compliance teams or behind projects, never visible, never on a stage. The Speaker Index exists to drag them into the light.
The end goal is a number
Pressed on when the Collective gets to declare victory, Drost does not hedge. “I think we’re happy when the show rate for women is almost 50/50, or 40/60,” she said. The target is not representation for its own sake. It goes back to the system she wants built right the first time, by more than half of the people who will end up using it, the same diversity point Deloitte’s Sebastiaan Verdonk made to me from the other side of the industry.
So the ask to women already in crypto is direct. “They need to see that they belong at the table. There are women here in this space, but not enough. They need to show up more, take their place, and own it.”
The events that keep selling out
If there is doubt about demand, the Collective’s own events answer it. “At Bitcoin Amsterdam we thought maybe a small event, 25 women, or 50,” Drost said. “But there were so many people signing up we had to make a stop. Same at this event.” The feedback that comes back tells its own story. “Oh my god, we missed it so much. I thought I was the only one, and there are so many of us here.”
That is the whole thesis in one reaction. The women were always there. What was missing was the room that let them find each other, and the line outside the door that proves they showed up.
Cryptofocus is backing the Crypto Women Collective through this run, and the next checkpoint is close: a community event on 8 July, with the first headline findings from the Adoption Index due to follow. Watch the full interview above, and watch my conversation with co-founder Laura Peijs for the rest of the roadmap.
Recorded at Dutch Blockchain Week 2026, Johan Cruijff ArenA, Amsterdam. Follow @Cryptofocus_NL on X for the rest of my Summit interviews.
