Laura Peijs had done all her interviews over video during the pandemic, so the first time she actually walked onto the trading floor of the firm she had just joined was her first day on the job. What stopped her cold was not the noise or the screens. It was who she didn’t see. There were almost no women. That moment, equal parts unsettling and clarifying, became the seed of a movement, and at Money 20/20 Europe she told us the whole story.
| What You Need to Know |
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| 1Interview recorded at Money 20/20 Europe 2026, 2 to 4 June, at the Amsterdam RAI. |
| 2Laura Peijs is Head of Communications and Marketing at Treasury and co-founder of the Crypto Women Collective. |
| 3She co-founded the Collective with Lisanne Drost after seeing how few women were in the room; it now has 500+ subscribers and 150+ members, women and male allies alike. |
| 4At Treasury, her ambition is unusual for the sector: give a Bitcoin company a real consumer (B2C) brand, something she says has not been done before. |
| 5Next up: a "Speaker Index" to surface women experts events struggle to find, and a survey, in partnership with Cryptofocus, baselining women's crypto adoption in the Netherlands. |
Peijs is difficult to give a single title. She is Head of Communications and Marketing at Treasury, the Bitcoin treasury company aiming to list on Euronext Amsterdam, and she is the co-founder of the Crypto Women Collective. The two roles braid together into one idea that kept surfacing in our conversation: crypto only goes mainstream when it stops talking to the same people and starts bringing in everyone it has been ignoring.
Giving Bitcoin a brand people feel
Start with Treasury, which Peijs calls the foundation of her world. She joined last year, drawn less by the chance to chase profit than by a founder who looked at the market differently, treating a Bitcoin treasury as something that exists to drive adoption, not just returns. (Her CEO, Khing Oei, gave us a separate masterclass on the treasury model.) Her job is to take that story somewhere unexpected.
Most Bitcoin treasury companies last year were built for a retail crowd, and many are now trading down. Peijs is chasing the harder, bigger prize: the institutional and traditional-finance audience. That means showing up at Bloomberg and J.P. Morgan events to talk about Bitcoin as a reserve asset, meeting traditional finance where it actually is rather than waiting for it to wander over. “They have to meet in the middle,” she said of crypto and TradFi, “and that’s really what truly unlocks adoption.”
Her most contrarian ambition, though, is about feeling. She wants to build genuine brand attribution for a Bitcoin company, the kind of warmth and recognition you get from a consumer brand, something she says the space has never managed. The Dutch market, I noted with the local word nuchter, is sober and sees-it-to-believe-it, so credibility has to be earned through education, content, and presence rather than hype. Pull it off, and you reach people who are just starting their journey, not only the traditional investor demographic, and that is where the next wave of adoption actually lives.
The Collective that started with an empty floor
The trading-floor moment never left her. At Bitcoin Amsterdam she saw the same thin representation again, and this time she did something about it, founding the Crypto Women Collective with her co-founder Lisanne Drost. They hosted an event expecting a modest turnout and were overwhelmed when more than a hundred people showed up. That response told them there was something real here.
“Women want to be connected. Having peers in the space, being able to look up to people, being able to learn from people, that’s how you bring more people in. It’s not about exclusivity, everyone is welcome. It’s about making sure that if women want to come along, they have the resources, the information and the contacts to make decisions, both in investing and in their careers.”
Her argument is also a hard-nosed talent argument, not only a fairness one. Crypto is one of the fastest-growing fields in the world, she pointed out, citing a World Economic Forum piece from earlier this year, and yet it keeps drawing from the same small pool. Peijs came into crypto from outside it, and she sees a wealth of cross-disciplinary skill the industry is leaving on the table. If crypto genuinely wants to go mainstream, it needs new blood and fresh perspectives, and half of that untapped talent is women it has not bothered to recruit. The Collective now counts 500-plus subscribers and 150-plus members, women and male allies both. (Full disclosure, and a point of pride for us: Cryptofocus is a supporter.)
What’s next: data and a stage
The roadmap, she said, has accelerated past where she expected it to be. There are tracks for established builders and an education pipeline for newcomers who want to understand the space before they invest in it. Two launches are coming that turn the mission into infrastructure. The first is a Speaker Index, a way to surface the women experts that conferences perennially claim they cannot find, putting them at the front of the room. The second is a survey, run together with Cryptofocus, to baseline women’s crypto adoption in the Netherlands because you cannot prove a program is working, or show how far the gap really runs, without the data underneath it.
That instinct, fix the thing you can measure, is what makes Peijs more than an advocate. The gender gap in crypto is real and well documented; by most counts, roughly three in four crypto holders are men. Her bet is that the gap closes not with slogans but with peers, education and hard numbers, and that doing so is not charity but the single most obvious way to grow the entire market. The empty trading floor that unsettled her on day one turned out to be a business case. She is now building the thing that fills it.
This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. Join or follow the Crypto Women Collective via its community, and watch the full Cryptofocus series, including our conversation with MaaS Ventures’ Sunny Jiang, a fellow backer of the Collective.
