‘The Boys Are Getting Loaded Rich.’ Now Women-Led Crypto Groups Demand Their Turn

For Mila Kunis, the actress known for her starring roles in “That ’70s Show,” “Bad Moms” and “Black Swan,” the journey down the crypto rabbit hole involved a lot of lost sleep and some new gray hairs.

As she developed the adult animated series “Stoner Cats”, which launched last summer with a collection of non-fungible tokens that grossed $8 million in just 35 minutes, Kunis kept a notepad handy. In it, she would jot down strange terms, like “blockchain wallet” and The Sandbox, that seemed to ooze out of every crypto enthusiast she met. Then she’d stay up until 2 a.m. researching, and memorizing her new vocabulary.

When Kunis was approached late last year to join BFF, a new crypto collective for women founded by entrepreneurs Brit Morin and Jaime Schmidt, she was ecstatic—and relieved. “I was like, ‘Oh, my god, I don’t want to join another boy’s club,’” Kunis told a virtual audience of about 5,000 people last week at BFF’s first-ever event, Minted. The much-hyped launch of BFF offered newcomers a free two-hour crash course on crypto culture, including an introduction to the strange world of NFTs taught by Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi (she compared the digital artwork to Chanel handbags), and words of encouragement from celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kunis herself.

While BFF may be the only crypto club whose Discord group includes people who’ve won Oscars and MTV Movie Awards, it’s far from alone in trying to crack the boy’s club of Web3. In fact, in the last few months alone, several women- and minority-led organizations have launched, hoping to ignite a full-blown insurgency within the male-dominated world of crypto.