Opinion by: Ashna Vaghela, chief customer officer at Mercuryo, and Vi Powils, CEO at World of Women.

For decades, the financial industry has treated creativity as a high-risk hobby. If you’re a woman building a global brand from a laptop, there is a risk that your bank doesn’t see a CEO. Rather, it sees someone with a non-standard income stream, without collateral, who might have to stop or pause working, to have children. Our global economy champions the middleman while the actual source of value can be treated as an afterthought.

For many women, particularly in emerging markets, creating online is not supplemental income; it is primary income and often the most borderless economic opportunity available to them.

That barrier runs deeper in emerging markets. A creator in Lagos can build a following of millions, only to find that the banking systems turn cross-border payments into a months-long exercise in fees and delays. When you control the flow of capital, you control who gets to stay in business. Women have spent years asking for a seat at the table where the legs were already broken.

The intersection of the creator economy and crypto payment infrastructure offers the first genuine path to financial freedom that doesn’t require anyone’s permission. As we move toward a world where code does the work that banks used to gatekeep, and that shift matters more for women than almost anyone else.

The invisible tax on identity

Legacy finance has failed women and creators in tandem. Venture capital still directs a tiny fraction of its capital to female founders with only 2.3% of venture capital funding having gone to female-founded companies in 2024. Credit scoring still penalizes uneven income, which is the reality for most independent artists. These systems were designed for a 9-to-5 world that is no longer the default way of being.

Layered on top of that is the platform toll. Some take up to 50 percent of earnings before a single cent reaches a creator’s wallet. You’re renting your audience from a landlord who can evict you whenever the terms do not suit them. 

Programmable revenue and the end of Net-90

In the old world, a creator sells their work and can wait months to get paid. Smart contracts change this entirely. Revenue splits happen at the point of sale. If an artist collaborates with a developer, the payment doesn’t pool in a corporate account, it moves directly to their respective wallets the moment a transaction clears.

Related: Blockchain restores women’s power in AI

The code becomes the escrow. There’s no chasing invoices, no waiting on platforms to release what you’ve already earned. Hardcoded royalties mean creators benefit from the long-term value of their work regardless of where it’s resold. 

While an imperfect system, the structure of onchain royalties is intended to help artists capture value over time, rather than relying solely on single transactions. OpenSea made royalty enforcement optional, which most marketplaces have now followed. This is what we mean by participatory capitalism: a model where the growth of the whole, lifts the people who actually built it. For many artists, especially women building global audiences, this shift is more than technical, it enables consistent revenue without depending on a platform’s schedule or policies.

Infrastructure as the foundation of family

Infrastructure sounds dry until you realise it’s the difference between asking for permission and having power. Community is a multiplier, but infrastructure is the engine. For the millions of women entering the creator economy, crypto rails offer a global passport that doesn’t check for borders or bias.

The community talks a lot about community in Web3, but what is really being described is something closer to family. A community is a group you associate with. A family shows up when things get hard. Stablecoins have become that bridge for creators in regions with volatile currencies, letting them hold the value of their work without needing a bank’s approval. 

When you lower friction at both ends of a transaction, the creativity in the middle takes off. There is already seeing a generation of entrepreneurs who don’t need an invitation to the boardroom because they own the system it sits on. Reliable payment rails make the difference between being able to monetize globally and being restricted to local, slow, or costly banking systems, a gap that disproportionately affects women creators in emerging markets.

Moving toward ownership

Inclusion is not a gift. Ownership is holding the deed, not being handed a seat. The shift to Web3 payment infrastructure moves us toward that deed. This moment is about refusing to let legacy systems set the value of creative communities. The infrastructure is ready. The only thing left is for the creators to lead.

Let us stop waiting for the system to change. Let us continue to the payment rails that replace it. 

Opinion by: Ashna Vaghela, chief customer officer at Mercuryo, and Vi Powils, CEO of World of Women.