2023 is the Perfect Time to Hire Web3 Talent

Working in the fast-growing cryptocurrency industry can be both exhilarating and fulfilling. However, like the digital assets it deals with, the crypto job market can be highly unstable. A report from CoinDesk on January 17th showed that the current bear market has caused a loss of over 29,000 jobs since April 2022, with about 2,000 of those cuts coming in the first two weeks of 2023. That's an average of 3,200 job losses per month in the past nine months. This looks disastrous if you were  considering a career in the crypto space.

In spite of the recent  layoffs, the crypto job market has shown great potential since the past few years. According to Bloomberg, the number of job postings on LinkedIn with keywords such as "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain" increased by over 600% in 2021 compared to the previous year, and almost 400% compared to the same time in 2019.

Despite the current bear market, there are still over 15,000 job postings per month in the sector. This highlights the continued recruitment efforts, even in a volatile job market.

Monica Long, the new Ripple President, is optimistic about the future of the industry. She stated this to Cointelegraph: “We’ve weathered many [crypto] winters and are coming off a record year of business and customer growth… We’re continuing to grow our team.” Similarly, after the formalization of its partnership with Avalabs, Amazon (AWS) started publishing job offers on February 1st. It signifies their strong initiative to attract and retain talent by recruiting during the bear market. However, to date, most recruitment comes from a dense fabric of bold startups transforming our society with the new paradigm of decentralization.

Indeed, according to a market research report, the Blockchain market size is expected to experience significant growth, expanding at a CAGR of 68% until  2027.

With the current softening of the Web3 talent shortage, 2023 certainly presents a key opportunity for companies to hire top talents. With companies like Ripple, Amazon and thousands of startups actively recruiting, now is the time to secure top talent before the shortage tightens again in the near future.

Total number of jobs in the industry in 2023

The latest CFTE Blockchain job report shows that the 54 largest Blockchain Unicorns employ 32,500 people worldwide, with the largest proportion (40%) working in IT Engineering.

However, the CFTE Job Report's Blockchain analysis is limited in scope as it only represents a fraction of the broader industry. The industry can be segmented into two categories: token-based projects (e.g. Avalabs, Parity Technologies, Nomadic Labs, Ocean Protocol, UniSwap, Curve, etc…) and service-based entities (such as Big 4, IT services, banks, exchanges, data providers, miners, etc…).Our analysis indicates that the two segments are of comparable size in terms of employment.

Furthermore, there are currently nearly 9,500 active cryptocurrencies on CoinMarketCap, with a 9% growth in the last year, despite the bear market.

Extrapolating these findings, we estimate that around 20,000 teams are currently employing staff in the sector. Based on our experience, teams with a live project, active on the market, have at least 10 full-time employees. With these assumptions, the total number of jobs in the market is likely over 230,000(*).

An additional method to estimate the number of jobs in the market is to examine the number of active blockchain developers. It is estimated that IT engineers account for around 40% of the market's employees, with approximately 50% of them being blockchain developers. The number of monthly active blockchain developers on Github is 23,000, and it's estimated that around half of blockchain developers don't publish on public Github. This extrapolates to an estimated 46,000 monthly active blockchain developers, making up roughly 20% of the total employees in the sector, indicating the sector employs over 230,000 people.

With converging evidence pointing towards a common trend, we are confident in our projection that the blockchain industry is employing over 230,000 people worldwide.

Total number of job offers per month in 2023

Regarding the total number of new job offers per month, we provide two estimates. The first approach is based on the bottom-up assumption, taking into account the growth of the number of new projects and an estimated talent's turnover of 30% per year. Based on this approach, we estimate that there will be 53k open positions(*) to fill in 2023, which is approximately 4.5k positions per month.

The second approach, the top-down assumption, considers the number of job postings on LinkedIn and assumes an average duration of three months for positions to be filled. Based on this approach, we estimate that there will be 5k new positions per month.

Our two approaches indicate an estimated demand for over 50,000 jobs in 2023. Despite the current bear market, this year offers a rare opportunity to access talents relatively easily, as compared to the expected talent shortage in the future growth forecast for the industry.