Demand for cryptocurrency and blockchain talent is soaring, as big banks make a big push into the as-yet unregulated space. According to LinkedIn, U.S. job postings for “crypto” and “blockchain” positions have skyrocketed 615% in August, compared to the same period last year.
big banks and that’s really the sea change over the past few years,” Devin Banerjee, LinkedIn’s editor-at-large of business and finance, told Yahoo Finance.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon publicly expressed his doubts about bitcoin (BTC-USD), the largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $1.17 trillion, as recently as last month in an interview, calling it “a little bit of fool’s gold” that has “no intrinsic value,” that regulators would “regulate the hell out of.” Yet despite Dimon’s skepticism, the bank started offering clients access to half a dozen crypto funds in July.
Crypto talent hiring by major financial services firms rose 40% in the first half 2021, compared to the same period last year, according to LinkedIn data. The site projects these firms are on pace to add more than three times as many workers with experience in digital assets to their payrolls in 2021 than they did in 2015.
JPMorgan Chase, BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Capital One, UBS, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and Barclays are the major financial institutions hiring the most crypto talent for a mix of roles ranging from sales professionals to workers designing crypto offerings for consumers and engineers building blockchain platforms for banks.
