By Amanda Wick, Board Member, and Erik Balsbaugh, Executive Director of Open Frontier
The official strip club after-party at Consensus, complete with lap dances, cash-throwing, and corporate branding, wasn’t just an embarrassing night out for a supposedly maturing industry. It was the inevitable product of a bargain crypto made years ago, and the deafening silence that followed from the industry’s most powerful institutions is exactly what that bargain looks like when it comes due.
People are right to be angry. But if you understand the political incentives now shaping this industry, none of it is surprising.
For years, crypto operated in a policy vacuum. Democrats treated digital assets as either a punchline or a threat to be handled through enforcement actions rather than governance. That abdication created an opening. Into that vacuum stepped a political movement eager to embrace crypto as a symbol of deregulation, grievance, and disruption.
The industry, desperate for regulatory clarity, took the deal.
The Faustian bargain was straightforward: support and protection in exchange for alignment, not just on policy, but on culture. The same movement that promised regulatory clarity and a friendlier posture toward digital assets also normalized a “grab ‘em by the pussy” ethos that treats women as disposable and eq uality as a joke. When you buy into that coalition, you don’t just get the policy. You get the culture as a package deal.
This is what happened at Consensus. It wasn’t a one-off mistake by a conference organizer. It was an industry acting in perfect alignment with its political commitments.
What makes this moment more troubling than the event itself is who stayed quiet.
The very players brought in to give crypto “institutional maturity,” Wall Street veterans, public-market alumni, global banks and brands, had remarkably little to say. Institutions that market themselves as professional, grown-up stewards of this technology went silent in the face of behavior that would be grounds for termination at any traditional bank, exchange, or Fortune 500 offsite.
Their silence is not accidental. It is fear, operating exactly as intended.
Speaking clearly about gender equality, professional norms, or harassment is now viewed as politically risky for anyone whose business model depends on a friendly ear in an administration that is loudly and proudly “anti-woke.” The message has been received: if your industry’s survival depends on a coalition that treats support for women as a partisan act, you will stay quiet, even when women are being degraded in your own conference hall. This is how cultural regression becomes permanent: not through the loudest voices, but through the calculated silence of people who know better and say nothing.
It would be easy to stop there and blame the usual suspects, the organizers, the sponsoring platforms, the political ecosystem that uses misogyny as a branding tool. They are culpable. Full stop. But the harder truth is that this outcome was made possible by a broader collapse of leadership across the board.
Democrats created the conditions for this bargain by refusing to govern. Instead of building a coherent, values-driven regulatory framework, they leaned on enforcement and condescension. They left a multi-trillion-dollar question, how do we govern the financial infrastructure of the 21st century, to be answered by whoever showed up willing to claim it. Those who showed up weren’t particularly interested in gender equity or financial inclusion. Now we are living with the consequences.
The path forward requires more than outrage.
Democratic leaders must stop treating crypto as a fringe nuisance. The underlying infrastructure, programmable money, decentralized networks, global payment rails, isn’t going away. Abandon that space, and you abandon the workers, consumers, and communities who will live under rules written by others.
Regulators must make explicit what should be obvious: the same expectations placed on banks and broker-dealers around harassment and workplace conduct apply to crypto as it institutionalizes. “Innovation” is not a license to sponsor environments that degrade participants.
Industry leaders must use their leverage. Boards and executives cannot claim to be building the financial system of the future while outsourcing their ethics to the loudest political benefactor of the moment. Set enforceable criteria for sponsored events. Tie leadership performance to retention, inclusion, and workplace safety, not just trading volume. And communicate clearly that political alignment on regulation does not mean importing the most regressive cultural norms of any party into company culture.
The question is not whether crypto should exist. It already does. The question is whose values will govern it.
The strip club wasn’t the scandal. It was the signal. The real scandal is what it reveals about who is writing the rules of the future, and who is being written out of them.
If we don’t build a credible, values-driven alternative, we deserve exactly the industry we get.
So now we are living with the consequences: a crypto industry that can get meetings at the highest levels of government, but that seems increasingly unsure whether it is safe to publicly endorse basic gender equality. A space that talks endlessly about “institutional maturity,” while tolerating behavior that looks more like a bachelor party than a boardroom. A generation of highly-qualified women and non‑binary talent leaving the industry in droves because they don’t believe this is an ecosystem they can trust with their careers.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but changing course requires more than outrage about a strip club.
First, Democratic leaders and policymakers on the left must stop treating crypto as a fringe annoyance and start treating it as a mainstream policy domain. You don’t have to love every token to recognize that the underlying infrastructure – programmable money, decentralized networks, global payment rails – isn’t going away. If you abandon that space, you abandon the workers, consumers, and communities who will live with the rules that others write.
Second, we need technology‑neutral standards that make explicit what should already be obvious: the same expectations we place on banks, broker‑dealers, and exchanges around harassment, discrimination, and workplace conduct apply in crypto as it institutionalizes. Regulators can make clear that “innovation” is not a license to sponsor environments that degrade employees or participants, just as “free speech” is not a license to ignore market manipulation or fraud.
Third, industry leaders themselves must recognize their leverage. Boards and executives cannot claim to be building the financial system of the future while outsourcing their ethics to the loudest political benefactor of the moment. They can:
- Set and enforce clear criteria for sponsored events and partnerships, such as the IISI initiative proposed by the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, explicitly ruling out venues and formats that demean or exclude.
- Tie leadership performance and compensation to metrics around inclusion, retention, and workplace safety, not just trading volume or assets under custody.
- Communicate, publicly and consistently, that political alignment on regulation does not mean importing the most regressive cultural norms of any party into company culture.
Finally, civil society – especially organizations that work on women’s rights, labor, and democracy – needs to recognize crypto, digital assets, and emerging tech as core terrain. This is not a sideshow. The systems being built today will shape who has access to credit, who gets surveilled, who can transact, and whose rights are protected or eroded in digital spaces. If those conversations happen only between the industry and the faction most hostile to equality and inclusion, the outcomes are predictable.
The question is not whether crypto should exist; it already does. The question is whose values will govern it.