The Web3 space is growing rapidly, and women around the world are working hard to be leaders in the ecosystem. Women from developing countries are especially involved and leading the way, often helping other women and underrepresented communities understand the possibilities of the space to give them their well-deserved financial and creative freedom.
In honor of Hispanic and Latinx Heritage Month, here’s a highlight of the work of some of the Hispanic women breaking barriers and creating a more inclusive Web3:
Gladys Garrote is a Cuban Art Historian, professor, writer and curator giving a wide range of Latin American artists exposure inside and outside the Web3 space. She co-founded ClitSplash, an all-female collective that sources and curates NFT art and culture for the metaverse. As true believers of equal opportunities and representation, ClitSplash focuses on featuring women and trans artists and artists from other minorities.
Garrote is also the curator of The Infinite Machine Movie collection, a collaborative effort of 10k+ NFTs created by 36 emerging artists mainly from countries where decentralization has a major impact on lives and finances. The project was launched to produce a movie based on the book by the same name, that tells the story of the crypto-hackers that brought Ethereum to life.
Camila Russo, is the author of the book, leads the NFT movie project and is one of the most prolific and dedicated cryptocurrency journalists. She’s also hispanic, from Chile and is the founder of The Defiant, one of the most trusted media and news companies in the DeFi space. Before getting into Web3, she worked for many years at Bloomberg. Russo is also a Founding BFF.
The Infinite Machine project gave Gladys and Camila the opportunity to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican, where they talked to the Pontifex about how crypto can be a tool for his message of inclusivity. A historic moment that reinforces how NFTs dissolve political borders and helps people living in emerging communities through technology.
NFTgirl, is a Venezuelan entrepreneur with a background in media and business and one of the first female NFT collectors supporting 1/1 art and empowering artists around the globe. She’s been exposed to art from a very young age through her family, and has always been fascinated by contemporary art, but being from a developing country meant her access to see and obtain art was very limited. This changed when she discovered NFTs and she embraced the borderless accessibility she longed for in the traditional art world.
Her collection started to grow and get noticed, to the point that Sotheby's invited her to curate pieces for the first sale in Sotheby’s Metaverse, consisting of 53 lots of culturally significant NFT art from the vaults of 19 renowned collectors. She has since continued to collect 1/1 art and empowers artists and creators in the community through her YouTube show, The Joy of NFTs, and her weekly Twitter Spaces IYKYK where she invites and highlights digital creators making waves in the NFT space.
BelleNFT is a trader and investor with a finance background who’s passionate about educating women and the Latin community for financial independence. She is also the co-host of the IYKYK Twitter Spaces along with NFTgirl, and a single Mom and widow. This difficult situation made her attend group counseling, which made her realize how many women were completely unprepared to stand on their own. When they lost their husbands, they also lost their homes and had taken on extra shifts, all while dealing with their own grief.
She spends her time between Twitter Spaces, Discord and Telegram groups giving tips and spreading her knowledge on investing and trading to women all around so they can be financially independent, no matter their condition.
Ana María is a first-generation Colombian-American and an award-winning poet and artist whose work has been recognized, published and exhibited around the world.
As a writer and author, she realized that the NFT space opened up the opportunity to easily bypass publishers and sell directly to her readers. It also allowed her to concentrate more on creating and crafting her art.
Following her advocacy and belief that poems should be valued as works of art, she experimented with this new technology and helped other authors to enter it too, leading her to co-found theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery where the intrinsic value of poems as works of art is made manifest via blockchain technology.
She’s now opening up the world of poetry to the masses, and the world of NFTs to poets and authors around the world.
Sol Siete is also bringing eyes to the world of NFTs, although she’s doing it through crypto music. As one of the first Argentinian women to mint her music into an NFT, she has made her mission to change the music industry and onboard as many music artists as possible, giving them the opportunity to make a living from what they most love doing.
She’s been traveling the world talking about music NFTs and minting her music live in international music festivals and forums like the Andalucia BIG in Spain, in front of big names in the music industry. She’s also part of Crypto Música Records, the first iberoamerican NFT Record Label, and CMTV, the first Music TV in Decentraland.
Gianina Skarlett is a Venezuelan Founder, CEO, and Lead Engineer of the 10k NFT collection Crypto Tech Women and the educational platform W3 Learn Academy. Both are community-centric brands with the purpose to support and empower women to be and succeed in tech and Web3.
Skarlett was a Software Engineer at an AI Silicon Valley company previous to joining the Web3 industry, and her mission now is to continue to grow and lead the vision of Crypto Tech Women while ensuring the right culture is nurtured within the community. A culture that is inclusive, where everyone feels supported, encouraged, listened and cared for. She has empowered 20,000+ community members worldwide to take space in Web3.
Camila Ramos is a developer advocate passionate about creating concise and easy-to-understand technical content as a tool to building a more equitable future for all. Her calling has always been education. Her mom always tells the story of how she would sit all her teddy bears down, facing a whiteboard, and stand up in front of them and teach them. But she realized quite early that teachers don’t get paid very well, so she had to take a different path. Thanks to her participation on Code.org’s “Hour of Code”, she learned that coding meant she could build cool things without having to be good with her hands (which she wasn’t), so she decided to learn how to code and go through the engineering path.
Despite her difficulties as a Latina student, she managed to study Computer Science and start her career in PayPal. Because her passion about educating others never disappeared, while she was still in college she founded STEMTank, a technology education company that offers free after-school and summer STEM programs aimed at increasing the number of Black and Brown students in engineering and technical positions.
Now, in her Web3 journey, she combines building in the space with empowering and educating people from underrepresented backgrounds, especially kids and women. She’s a big contributor at DeveloperDAO and Women Build Web3, two decentralized collectives onboarding, educating, and retaining talented, diverse builders in this space.
These are only a small fraction of the incredible Hispanic women paving the way in the Web3 space and making it a more inclusive and accessible ecosystem, especially for those traditionally marginalized.
If you wanna meet and follow the work of more Hispanic women in the space, I recommend you check THIS Twitter post where I called for them and the response was overwhelming!
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
Sabrina Bonini is the Founder of Cripto Es Cultura, a platform that aims to educate and empower Spanish-speaking female artists and creators in the Web3 and NFT space.
