Whether you’re a die-hard “hodl”-er or a crypto skeptic, you can’t ignore that interest in crypto, NFTs, and blockchain tech is only increasing. Pew Research found in November that while nearly 90% of Americans had heard of cryptocurrencies, only 16% had bought or sold any themselves. Companies from all different sectors are looking for ways to capitalize on that unsure majority, and they’re staffing up to do it.
In this climate, established companies are recruiting at an increasing rate to help build out existing branches of their business, or create new ones altogether, to harness the growing power of blockchain-based technologies.
We were curious to see if we could quantify the crypto-focused hiring trends of companies in sectors such as tech, finance, social media, consulting, and media. Using data from our parent company Thinknum, we combed through job listings representing 10,000 public or private companies from the past six months and analyzed the results.
To track crypto-related job listings from non-crypto-focused companies, we filtered through hundreds of thousands of records to find job listings with titles containing “crypto,” “blockchain,” “metaverse,” or “NFT'' while filtering out near misses, like cryptography jobs. We also eliminated any businesses that primarily focus on crypto, such as Coinbase and Binance (though you might want to look there if you’re seeking a crypto job: Coinbase plans to hire 2,000 new people this year). Here’s what we found.
The non-crypto companies with the most crypto job listings in the last six months
2021 saw a major push into crypto by PayPal, the company on our list looking to fill the most crypto-related jobs. The platform began letting its users checkout with Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies last March, and soon after let users of its social payment app Venmo buy and sell crypto as well. PayPal’s competitor in this push, Square, which is helmed by Twitter founder and Bitcoin maximalist Jack Dorsey, earned a spot on our list of companies most in search of crypto workers as well.
Notable at No. 6 on the list is Reddit. While the forum site’s valuation of around $10 billion is dwarfed by some of its neighbors on our list, like J.P. Morgan ($400 billion) and Amazon ($1.5 trillion), Reddit is one of the most viewed sites on the web, so any move it makes could be influential. Reddit posted job listings for iOS and Android engineers to work on its NFT platform, among others. The site recently tested letting users set an NFT as their profile picture, in a similar move to Twitter.
Job titles provide insight into crypto hiring focus
This word cloud shows which terms are the most common in the titles of our set of crypto-related job listings, with larger words being more common. For example, listings for senior roles showed up significantly more often than listings for associates.
We can see that companies aren’t only looking for engineers to build out their crypto products. While “engineer” and “software” are prominent in the word cloud, job listings for managers, development leads, and security engineers were also common.
Interest in NFTs is a small subset of the larger crypto picture. Besides Reddit, companies such as Deloitte, Barclays, and Kainos posted listings for jobs related to NFTs or NFT platforms.
The U.S. leads, but companies are hiring in other countries too
While U.S.-based job listings make up the majority, listings for crypto jobs in India, Singapore, Israel, Canada, and the U.K. make up more than a quarter of the total listings where our data included the job location.
J.P. Morgan and IBM make up a significant portion of India-based crypto job listings. Meanwhile, some 40% of Israel’s listings were posted by the social trading company eToro. The Israeli company isn’t ignoring the U.S., though. Recent reports show eToro has been involved in lobbying Albany to sway crypto regulation in the state of New York.
Crypto jobs openings over time
Aside from an expected dip in job listings around the holidays, the number of listings for crypto jobs has shown strong overall growth in the past six months. The total number of crypto jobs listed by the companies tracked by Thinknum recently surpassed 2,000.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
