Crypto job seekers see new reality: Things had gone "nuts"

• Crypto has been laying off employees in swaths, sometimes by as much as 30% — from big exchanges with thousands of full-time employees such as Coinbase and Kraken, to custodians like Anchorage Digital and data firms like Messari and Nansen.

What they're saying: Job experts in crypto tell Axios that employers have the upper hand, though it wasn't too long ago that candidates did.

• "2022 crypto was broken, 2023 crypto recruiting is dead," Eve Miller, a crypto technical recruiter, said.

Zoom out: Downsizing is not just happening out of necessity — a penalty for overhiring and for paying outsized salaries to compete — but is also being seized on by bosses as a chance to cut under the cover of layoffs trending across tech, Jackson said.

With fewer roles open and a growing pool of job seekers, startups — firms with 100 people or fewer — are looking for "hustlers" and "self-starters" when it comes to bull-market roles like marketing and sales, crypto startup adviser Ryan Andersen, who specializes in hiring for Layer 1s and Layer 2s, said.

• "Some candidates are institutionalized from working at a larger company. Well, at a 50-person startup, you can't delegate, there's no budget for that."
• Between the lines: Read skeleton staff with folks carrying the workload of more than just one. Though that's what one might expect at a startup.

Those coming from Big Tech might also find comp packages notably less sweet compared to 18 months ago. (Read more about that below.)

On the bright side: Developers are still in demand — plus privacy guys, cryptographers, and systems engineers, Nako Mbelle, founder and CEO of Fintech Recruiters, tells Axios.

• "Anyone building new protocols, Layer 2s — infrastructure is where most of the roles are right now," Mbelle says. "There are still people who want to be Ethereum killers."

Flashback: Things had gone "nuts"

Months ago the industry couldn't get enough. "Accelerators went nuts. All of 2021, salaries went nuts. Sales, product, marketing," Miller said.

• "I knew things got crazy when companies were willing to offer whatever the candidate asked because it wasn’t based on data, but market demand."
• "They raised money and needed to come up with products to market quickly. So 10x their salary — no problem, if they had any knowledge in crypto."
• "Engineers in Russia normally making $50K, were making $200K."

The intrigue: Some CEOs have justified cuts, pointing to a hot growth strategy during the 2020 to late 2021 hiring spree, but Miller wonders how true that was in hindsight.

• "The crypto startups, the projects that were trying to go from zero to one, NFTs, web3 — there was no headcount, there was no plan."

• "They didn't know what they needed — they were just trying to come up with a minimally viable product."

Compensation sweeteners

Tokens became a big part of the deal in the crypto world's hiring boom, which was an enticing proposition when prices were high.

• Now it's a drag.

Between the lines: Altcoins like solana (SOL), avalanche (AVAX), and polkadot (DOT) are trading at a fraction of where they were at 2021 peaks — down roughly 90%.

• "The 2019 talent learned Solidity (the programming language for Ethereum that also works on many other chains built later), and a lot of talent that applied for jobs wanted to get rich," Miller said of those developers who switched from Big Tech to crypto during the recent cycle.

Today, "you throw tokens in there, and a lot are hesitant about taking the risk — well they all can't go back to Big Tech, plus the total packages aren't there," Andersen said, referring to the days when tech offered potential hires equity in the company.

• "Candidates want to tell you the tokens are worth X, well, like, no... we're in a bear market, everybody's down right now."

The intrigue: "I like hiring in Europe," he said. "The candidate in New York or SF is gonna try to squeeze $5K to $10K more off the base salary as you get to closing saying 'the cost of living is high' — it's a turnoff to employers."

The bottom line: "The fact that the SEC named a bunch of tokens as unregistered securities has a chilling effect on the space — it's probably making it less attractive for talent," Braintrust chief Jackson said.