Female business owners in the US receive less credit on average than male business owners
A recent article I saw reveals that women and men receive vastly different rates of funding for growing their businesses. While certain men have a relatively easy time growing their business by securing additional funding, it appears statistically that everyone who does not fit that category is pretty much left out. Women who want to get a loan to expand their businesses quickly run into a "glass ceiling".
Crypto can be a possible solution
Here are some ways where crypto may be able to help:
- ICOs allow anyone in theory to launch and receive money from everyone around the world. This is a great equalizer for women, minorities, the less socially connected, to actually have a chance.
- Ethereum and DAICO model allow for a community to scale it's fund raising and direct funds intelligently.
What needs to be changed to get this to work?
In my opinion we need to update some of the laws. First if it is true that an opportunity gap does exist for certain people then something as simple as a tax deduction for all who invest in minority or female run businesses would provide the incentive for people who are participating in crowd funding. Another possible legal solution would be to reduce some of the requirements around "sophisticated investor" and the like. If you have to be a millionaire to invest then this pretty much blocks out a lot of women and minorities from becoming the VCs even in a decentralized context. If this could be removed, relaxed, or if individuals can voluntarily waive this "protection", then in my opinion we would have progress.
In my opinion crypto and blockchain tech can do more to spread opportunity than any other technology I've seen in my life. The problem is while we can come up with brilliant technology solutions it is often the case that to implement these solutions would be illegal, or present a lot of regulatory risk on the issuers, or would just cost too much. All of this just creates more barriers to entry and makes solving problems harder. If we look at Steem SMTs as an example we can see it can provide lots of opportunities for people of all races and any gender. The problem an issuer would have to deal with is "is my SMT a security?" and "how can I protect myself from legal/regulatory risk"? The cost of compliance is high even in the context of Steem SMTs and because of these costs we are not limited by what we can do technically but by the legal code itself.
As a result a lot of the greatest innovations will have to take place in countries and for people where the legal code is much more liberal. There may be less protections in these countries but it's going to be required in order to study what is possible and in order to trial different solutions in the market. In a country where people can trade crypto freely, where there isn't a regulator or if there is, the regulator is taking a hands off approach, then in my opinion we can see if there are any technical solutions which could help to solve the opportunity gap problem. We could even trial some of these solutions on Steem using SMTs, as long as the issuer of the SMT is a citizen of a country with relaxed legal and regulatory burdens, or just cheap costs of dealing with regulatory risk. [THIS POST WILL HAVE A FOLLOW UP POST SO STAY TUNED]