It’s the sixth annual Black Blockchain Summit, and organizers are quietly removing a couple rows of chairs from the room. The Howard University auditorium we’re in looks a third empty. There are at most 100 people in the crowd today—a far cry from the 1,500 who attended the summit over three days last year, when Sam Bankman-Fried was still hailed as crypto’s boy wonder. Now, in late September, he’s weeks away from being convicted for an $8 billion fraud scheme.

It is a space for discussing the relationship between money and man, the powers that be and what they have done with power. Online and in person, on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C., an estimated 1,500 mostly Black people have gathered to talk about crypto—decentralized digital money backed not by governments but by blockchain technology, a secure means of recording transactions—as a way to make money while disrupting centuries-long patterns of oppression.

Inside the World of Black Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency started out as mostly a hobby for tech-savvy, financial wizards who had money to play with — cultivating an image of its users as young, White “Bitcoin bros.” But today, a growing number of Americans of color are participating in the $2 trillion global industry as a way to build wealth outside the traditional banking system, which many say has historically excluded and discriminated against their communities.