The Crypto Craze

Crypto has been dominating headlines lately, from Dogecoin to Bitcoin the digital asset has become THE hot topic for news and media outlets. It’s not just media outlets that have latched on to the crypto craze, large institutions are also starting to explore the possibilities of this technology. Naturally we were curious as well, so in this post we use Linkup’s Raw dataset to take a look at who has job listings in this area.

Looking for jobs that have key terms in the title (”crypto”, “blockchain”, “bitcoin”, “doge”, “ethereum”, “defi”), we can see the historical patterns of firms hiring. After removing titles containing similar but non-relevant terms (“cryptologic”, “cryptographic”, “linguist”, “cryptography”, “cryptology”) we get a total of just under 6,000 job postings containing our keywords. Of those job listings, “Blockchain” is the most used keyword.

Another interesting stat is that the most common position is a Blockchain Developer or Engineer. The roles being hired seem to be highly technical, indicating that there has yet to be a great demand to hire any type of Blockchain analysts. Also interesting of the three coins included in the search, Bitcoin was the most frequently mentioned followed by Doge, and lastly Etherium.

Jumping to the firm side of things, we can see that IBM is investing the most resources into cryptocurrency technologies. On the consulting side, EY seems to be creating large teams to deal with clients’ blockchain needs. Another interesting note is that JP Morgan is the only bank that made the top 10 list.

This is only one dimension though, it’s also worth looking at the historical patterns of the firms with the most job listings. This can offer us a bit more insight into who is jumping on the bandwagon as the crypto trend is taking off, vs who has been hiring for awhile and is an expert in the space.

This view leads to a few more interesting insights. The first being, as a whole, job listings for crypto saw similar peaks around the middle to end of 2019. During this time we saw Amazon and Facebook both increase their job listings substantially. Another interesting detail that can be pulled out is that IBM’s job listings in the crypto space have continued over a long period of time.

Lastly, while consulting firms historically have not sought after talent in the crypto space, it appears that is starting to change as their jobs counts have skyrocketed recently.

When it comes to the job market, crypto, it appears, is still in its infancy. IBM, Facebook, and Amazon have experimented with crypto roles in the past, possibly laying a foundation for future products, while other companies are just arriving on the scene. In the short term, crypto shows no signs of fading from the headlines. It will be interesting to see if more institutions start to wade into the space, and to track how hiring trends unfold.

If you’re interested in the data behind this post, contact us to learn more.