Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0
Last year was one of the most chaotic for the broader crypto industry.
After FTX’s collapse, thousands of employees were laid off and many firms, especially those in the mining sector, closed shop entirely.
After layoffs and bankruptcies, cryptocurrencies were also hit hard. The industry’s market cap fell from roughly $2.23 trillion at the start of 2022 to just $832 million at the start of 2023, starting in earnest from June onwards and intensifying after the implosion of FTX, according to data from CoinGecko.
Still, software industry insiders claim that there has never been more demand for blockchain developers.
Demand for blockchain programming skills increased by 552% in 2022, according to a report by DevSkiller, which compiled over 200,000 skill assessments. Technology firms can use these assessments as part of the hiring process to assess a developer’s skills.
With declining asset prices and crypto firms tightening their belts, why the jump in developer demand?
Blockchain beyond tokens
DevSkiller CTO Tomasz Nurkiewicz told Decrypt that much of this demand likely stems from non-crypto companies looking to acquire developers with industry experience.
He said firms can “take advantage of blockchain for different reasons, not necessarily just for cryptocurrencies, but for storage or to have a decentralized proof of something in their own companies.”
The idea of decentralized storage and databases has already attracted some serious displays of faith. In September, Microsoft’s venture capital fund M12 invested $20 million in Space and Time, a startup that aims to build a decentralized data warehouse with SQL-like database capabilities.
The firm says its cryptographic protocol, called “proof-of-SQL,” will allow blockchain applications to perform analytics faster.
Financial firms looking to build their own blockchains could be another key driver of developer demand, according to BlockApp’s president and CEO Kieren James-Lubin. This may be due to some private financial markets being, in his words, “illiquid and weird.”
Several of the mainstays of traditional finance, including Blackrock, have made bold statements supporting tokenization, essentially bringing stocks, bonds and other traditional financial assets into a blockchain network.
Moves like this could mean hiring more developers with blockchain experience.
Mathew McDermott, Goldman’s Head of Digital Assets, echoed this sentiment in an interview with CNBCand said one of his main focuses for 2023 was on tokenization and “digitizing the lifecycle.”
Peer-to-peer gaming has been another area of growth in recent years, and firms in this niche will likely continue to hire blockchain developers, according to Nurkiewicz.
He said, “the field is still gaining popularity despite the problems with crypto markets and crypto exchanges.”
A report by DappRadar and the Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA) found that Web3 Gaming and metaverse projects raised $7.6 billion in 2022, a 59% increase from the previous year.
In the same year, blockchain games accounted for almost 50% of activity on the chain.
More than just speculation
More broadly, BlockApps’ James-Lubin said job opportunities will gradually move away from “speculative” use cases.
“From a credit perspective, we’re seeing a flight away from really speculative use cases,” James-Lubin explained. “One of the effects of today’s market sentiment and high interest rates is that interest in more speculative returns further into the future just collapses.”
He said investors are also much more cautious following the FTX meltdown in November and will generally want to invest in real-world use cases, as opposed to crypto-native opportunities.
“That’s a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective,” James-Lubin said. “All technology suddenly now has to think about profitability in a way that hasn’t been the case in the last decade or so.”
Because of trends like this, future demand for blockchain developers will not necessarily correlate nicely with crypto prices.
“Crypto companies will hopefully learn to do sensible financial planning, where asset prices less affect their ability to hire people, such as keeping some of their money in fiat currency,” James-Lubin explained.
Nurkiewicz nevertheless had reservations that some investors may not understand the difference between “the technology and the market” and are put off by blockchain projects anyway.
“We can see some kind of psychological movement here, which is not fully accounted for by the underlying technology,” Nurkiewicz explained.
What is a developer to learn?
According to both Nurkiewicz and James-Lubin, they see a large increase in demand for people with experience using the programming languages Solidity and Aetherium, as well as people who have experience using support tools within Ethereum development environment such as Hard Hat.
Although both managers told Decrypt that it’s a great time to start as a blockchain developer, Nurkiewicz believes that aspiring developers should try to get a strong traditional computer science background alongside blockchain skills.
This may include demonstrating working knowledge of key aspects of blockchain infrastructure. This could be having examples of smart contracts that they can show on their GitHub page, or understanding how Merkle trees work.
In terms of salaries developers can expect, DevSkiller reports that the average salary for blockchain-focused developers worldwide was around $79,983. That number rose to $177,500 for those based in the United States, making it one of the best-compensated specialties among developers.
Although the demand for blockchain skills exploded in 2022, the overall demand for these skills pales in importance to the old guard of programming languages such as JavaScript, Java, SQL and Python.
According to the 2022 Stack Overflow Survey, Solidity was only used by 1.45% of developers, compared to over 65% using JavaScript or 55% using HTML.
In addition, blockchain development is still niche. Of all the areas surveyed, only 2.5% of respondents described themselves as pure blockchain developers.
Being a “blockchain developer” is not nearly as synonymous with being employed by a crypto firm as it is in 2017. Opportunities are also emerging in lucrative fields such as traditional finance and gaming.
As a result, blockchain development can be a great career path regardless of market sentiment, says James-Lubin.
But even if crypto-related jobs are decoupled from the price of Bitcoin, he said it’s foolish for young people to base their entire careers on what’s “hot right now.”
Instead, the CEO said people should focus on their true interest as trends, be it blockchain, AI or delivery apps, come and go.
