For most of the history of humankind, work has been a pretty predictable enterprise.
You learnt a trade!
You did the trade,
You took the salary or commission and,
If you were fortunate, you retired on a modest pension.
But every now and then, some new industry arrives and blows all that out of the water. Suddenly, occupations that seemed impenetrably stable vanish into thin air, and entirely new career designations (that no one could ever think of) come up.
Cryptocurrency is such an industry.
For a long time every job around crypto (to be prices from 2007- 2016) was dismissed as a hobby or part time gig for the tech-inclined or folks with an exceptionally high tolerance for risk when dealing with finances.
Now, the industry has matured. What was once an internet experiment, is now a global economic powerhouse.
Going by the time-tested lesson taught to us by history “where there’s money, there are careers”, what’s the impact of the CryptoCurrency industry on the job market.
From banking to gaming to real estate, cryptocurrency is seeping into industries that once thought themselves immune. Just look at how many companies now quietly accept Bitcoin payments, or how investment funds track the current Bitcoin price with all the seriousness they once reserved for gold.
As of early 2022, around 15,174 businesses worldwide accepted crypto with over 2,300 in the U.S. alone).
Almost 28% of American small businesses in 2020 said they accepted cryptocurrency as payment
Tesla briefly accepted Bitcoin for car purchases in 2021, Starbucks and Home Depot rolled out support via crypto apps, and brands like Microsoft, AT&T, Coca-Cola and Gucci have all enabled crypto transactions in recent years
The conversation has shifted, and whether one likes it or not, the jobs are already following.
Growth Of Crypto Jobs In The Finance Sector!
One of the most obvious areas for crypto job growth is in finance
By the end of 2021, total assets under management in crypto funds had reached $62.5 billion, up from just $2.8 billion two years earlier
Deloitte’s 2021 global blockchain survey found 81% of financial services executives believe blockchain and digital assets have achieved mainstream adoption
And
73% fear their organization will lose competitive advantage if they fail to adopt these technologies. For instance, J.P. Morgan created its own JPM Coin and a network for interbank blockchain transfers, and dozens of major banks have piloted blockchain-based payment systems or settlement networks
Traditional banking, however, with the surge of companies like Revolut is facing an existential crisis. On top of that, they cannot avoid the growth of crypto but could never adopt the decentralized mechanism.
Thanks to this phenomenon, there is an increased demand for individuals who understand both worlds—individuals who can take the anarchic power of crypto and make it bankable and palatable to banks and regulators alike.
LinkedIn data shows that U.S. job postings mentioning “Bitcoin,” “Ethereum,” “blockchain,” or “cryptocurrency” grew 395% in 2021 compared to 2020
Indeed’s analysis likewise noted a 118% jump in crypto/blockchain job postings from late 2020 to mid-2021 as the market rebounded after the pandemic dip
Blockchain compliance officers, digital asset consultants, and decentralised finance (DeFi) analysts are just a few of the new careers that have emerged in response.
The first ensures that businesses dealing in crypto are not inadvertently breaking a dozen laws. The second advises businesses on how to integrate digital assets into their existing frameworks. And the third? Well, DeFi is attempting to reimagine the financial system from scratch, leaving banks out of it. If that sounds revolutionary, that’s because it is. But revolution, of course, is where the jobs have a tendency to show up.
In banking, there are some non-traditional banks that now see Blockchain as critical infrastructure.
68% of banks surveyed (Deloitte 2020) said they believe they will lose an edge if they don’t implement blockchain, and 84% expected blockchain to become mainstream in finance
Big players like HSBC and Wells Fargo, are implementing distributed ledger systems for faster settlement, trade finance, and digital currencies.
Crypto Jobs In The Tech Sector
Of course, not all crypto jobs are around the finance sector..
Crypto has become an inevitable part of many businesses. And all those businesses and the crypto industry as a whole, needs infrastructure.
And that means TECH or Dev jobs! A lots of them.
Blockchain developers already have high demand, tasked with building the networks on which everything from cryptocurrencies to contracts to supply chain management happens.
In LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report, “Blockchain Developer” ranked #1 with a 33× growth in openings over the prior year.
Like we mentioned in the starting, It’s one of those kinds of jobs that didn’t exist a decade and a half ago, and now companies can’t hire fast enough.
And then there are smart contract auditors, the ones who ensure that the self-executing contracts that run on blockchains don’t have loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. Because busted smart contracts have, on more than one occasion, sent millions of dollars into thin air (sometimes literally), it’s a job that isn’t going away anytime soon.
The crypto hacking landscape shows exactly why: in 2022, an estimated $3.8 billion was stolen via protocol exploits, driving intense demand for cybersecurity experts and ethical hackers in the blockchain space.
Firms that specialize in auditing, forensics, and compliance (e.g., Chainalysis, CertiK, and others) have scaled up teams significantly to keep up with the sophisticated nature of crypto threats.
Crypto and the Creator Economy
Other than money and technology, crypto is also quietly changing the way people make money in ways that would never have been thought possible a few years ago.
For example, take artists. Creative people have long suffered from the same problem: being paid fairly for their work without being at the mercy of intermediaries. Blockchains and NFTs have solved that problem.
Artists can now have ownership over digital art through non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
And the result is
NFT trading volume exploded from around $33 million in 2020 to $18.5 billion in 2021—a staggering 56,900% jump. And though the crypto market cooled in late 2022, NFT sales still hovered around $24–26 billion for that year, dwarfing pre-2021 levels.
Now, don’t be such a sceptic, but NFTs aren’t just about costly JPEGs of cartoon monkeys. The technology allows musicians, filmmakers, writers, and designers to sell to fans directly without needing to pass through a record label, publisher, or gallery taking a fat cut.
This has given rise to a new range of job titles—NFT strategists, tokenization consultants, and digital rights managers—none of which would have made sense a decade ago but are now at the centre of how digital ownership is evolving.
What New Jobs Can Crypto as an Industry Create in the Future?
Certainly, some of the activity crypto will create is the work that no one has even dreamed of yet.
Every technology revolution has imposed a sequence of unforeseen repercussions, and with them comes new jobs. Social media directors, drone operators, and podcast engineers—all professions that would have sounded laughably specialised one day but are now a mundane reality. This is simply the way the world works. Novel ideas sound almost scarily futuristic when you first hear them, then a few years pass and you’re charging your doorbell in the USB port of your couch like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
By 2030, we could have blockchain dispute mediators, who would settle disputes in decentralised communities. Or metaverse land brokers, trading virtual property in crypto-powered digital worlds, —a market that some analysts predict could surpass $1 billion by 2025 and possibly climb to $1 trillion by 2030.
Or even DAO therapists, counselling teams through the special workplace dynamics of companies that are fully run on blockchain governance.There are already glimpses of how this might unfold: Bloomberg projections suggest the metaverse alone could create over 24 million jobs globally by 2030, ranging from 3D asset designers to digital property experts.
And there is security.
As crypto grows, so does the need to protect it. Already, businesses are hiring blockchain forensic accountants to chase stolen funds and recover lost assets. But as the market swells, so will the security challenges become increasingly strange. Could we expect benevolent crypto hackers, retained to stress-test systems to destruction ahead of bad actors? Highly likely.
A Revolution That Doesn’t Care What You Think
The beauty of crypto is that it does not actually care whether people believe it’s true or not. It is not seeking approval. It is happening, careers are being formed, and companies are adapting as a result. It really does not matter if you believe Bitcoin is the future or a venture wager—there are already thousands of people making a living off of it, and that number will only increase as more businesses integrate blockchain technology into their business.
By 2022, the industry was estimated to employ over 82,000 people worldwide—up 351% from 2019—and that figure continues to climb.
And that is the real lesson here. Whether crypto replaces traditional finance, powers the metaverse, or delivers on some of its more hyperbolic predictions, the impact on jobs cannot be avoided. Just as the internet revolutionised everything from shopping to reporting, blockchain is doing the same to finance, business, and otherwise. The question is merely how quickly people will adapt.
For those looking forward to 2030, a good rule of thumb is that the most excellent careers tend to appear in the most unlikely of places. Today’s best-paid careers—data science, AI engineering, and social media consulting—were on the periphery at best not many years ago. Crypto will not be different. So whether one chooses to embrace it or ignore it, the fact remains: the future of work is changing, and once again, the most interesting jobs will belong to those willing to step into the unknown.
By Harsha Kiran
Harsha Kiran is the founder and innovator of Techjury.net. He started it as a personal passion project in 2019 to share expertise in internet marketing and experiences with gadgets and it soon turned into a full-scale tech blog with specialization in security, privacy, web dev, and cloud computing.