Written by: willthetrill
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
Is the hiring market in the cryptocurrency industry saturated now? Both yes and no. Although there were layoffs sporadically in December, overall, hiring momentum remained strong in the fourth quarter.
To uncover the truth, I specifically extracted data from major vertical recruitment websites in the crypto industry for the first two weeks of January 2026 (this data does not include official company recruitment pages). The results showed that only 85-90 new unique positions were added during this period.
This year's start has been quite quiet. In contrast, the data for January 2025 was quite impressive, with a total of 1,192 positions posted in that single month, making it the highest month for recruitment in all of 2025.
Data as of January 12, 2026
In the first two weeks of January 2025, the average number of daily job postings was about 38; in the same period of 2026, the average number of daily job postings was only about 6.5.
Recruitment activity in early January decreased by approximately 80% compared to the same period last year. This data confirms the widespread speculation: the industry's start this year is far less heated than last year.
Analyzing the details of the above job data, the main characteristics of the current recruitment market are as follows:
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Job Type Distribution: Technical / Engineering positions account for 60%, Non-Technical / Business Development positions account for 40%.
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Job Grade Distribution: Specialist / Senior Specialist / Manager / Department Head and other mid-to-senior level positions account for about 65%. This signal indicates that companies are prioritizing the recruitment of experienced talent to lead key projects related to core product development and business growth.
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Experience Requirements: Most positions require candidates to have more than 5 years of relevant experience; management positions require more than 7 years of experience.
When conducting screening interviews with candidates, I often ask them: What currently attracts you to the crypto industry? The answers are invariably two: prediction markets and stablecoins. Therefore, it's not surprising that the data shows about 60% of recruitment demand is concentrated in infrastructure teams, stablecoin projects, and payment / fintech infrastructure startups. Furthermore, the talent war between the Kalshi and Polymarket platforms continues, and this competition is expected to persist.
Currently, the most aggressive recruiters are those growth-stage companies (i.e., companies that have completed Series A funding or later rounds). A quick glance at the recruitment pages of several companies and information on the Ashby platform also confirms this conclusion.
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Series A Companies: Lifi Protocol has 13 open positions, Privy IO (acquired) has 10 open positions, Crossmint has 10 open positions, Coinflow Labs has 14 open positions;
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Series B Companies: TurnkeyHQ has 12 open positions;
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Series C Companies: Raincards has 49 open positions;
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Series D Companies: Anchorage has 66 open positions.
However, perhaps more interesting is the change in talent flow.
Having worked full-time in crypto recruitment for 5 years, I can't help but recall: "Has there ever been a public chain ecosystem, like Solana, that challenged Ethereum's dominance in the recruitment and developer growth arena?" The answer is: No, at least never on this scale.
Looking back, other public chains like Polkadot and Cosmos have all experienced phases of rapid developer growth, but they never managed to pose a challenge to Ethereum of the same magnitude in terms of market share and sustained recruitment scale.
Solana is the first ecosystem with the real strength to compete with Ethereum. In 2024, it set a historic record, achieving, for the first time since 2016, a higher percentage of new contributing developers than Ethereum. Solana attracted over 22% of the crypto industry's new developers, while Ethereum's share was about 16%. This phenomenon is quite rare, considering that in the past, Ethereum almost monopolized the vast majority of new talent.
Data source: Electric Capital "Developer Report", as of January 14, 2026
In the third quarter of 2025 alone, 23 Solana ecosystem projects completed financing, raising $211 million, a 70% year-on-year increase in ecosystem financing scale.
For example: When a project completes a $13.5 million financing round (like Raikucom did in Q3 2025), its first priority is to recruit 5-10 senior engineers to build the core engineering team and business development team. These types of positions often do not appear on public recruitment websites but are filled through investor / angel investor networks, hackathon events, and targeted headhunting.
The crypto industry is constantly evolving, and the landscape of the recruitment market will change accordingly. Through token issuance, crypto technology can push internet capital markets to maximize development, but the reality is that the vast majority of tokens issued in the past two years have seen their prices fall.
I believe that in 2026, the ripple effects of this phenomenon will gradually become apparent, affecting how companies raise risk capital, their market expansion strategies, and, of course, their talent recruitment strategies.
The projects that will stand out this year will undoubtedly be those with solid business fundamentals, a real user base, solving actual needs, and most importantly, generating revenue.
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