Tiger Research: Crypto employment report for the first half of 2026, the most stable job is actually...
Source: Tiger Research
Authors: Henry Kim, Ryan Yoon
Compiled and organized by: bitPushNews
Key findings
The cryptocurrency job market has yet to recover to its peak in 2022. According to Coincub data, the number of new cryptocurrency jobs reached 66,494 in 2025, a 47% rebound from the previous year, but still below the 2022 high.
The contraction intensified in 2026, and newly posted jobs on mainstream recruitment platforms fell by about 80% year-on-year in January.
Of the 2,932 active job postings in the first half of 2026, engineering jobs ranked first with 34.1%, while compliance/legal positions ranked second with 10.4%. Active job postings focus mainly on regulatory compliance and technology development.
From an industry perspective, centralized exchanges (CEX, accounting for 30.8%) and the stablecoin/payments sector (13.4%) together account for nearly half of recruitment demand. The gaming and NFT sector accounts for 2.4%.
In the past, the market was driven by token sales, and recruitment demand focused on community and token sales positions. As the market shifts to institutional participation, the ability to manage product operations and regulatory compliance becomes increasingly important.
1. 2021-2022 recruitment peak and current market position
The most active recruitment period in the cryptocurrency sector is from the end of 2021 to the first half of 2022. At the time, Bitcoin and Ethereum reached record highs, NFT trading volume surged, and DeFi's total hedged value (TVL) reached hundreds of billions of dollars.
Centralized exchanges have aggressively expanded to support global business operations. At the time, Coinbase had over 250 vacancies, Kraken over 300, and Binance over 600. DeFi protocols and the NFT marketplace have simultaneously absorbed large numbers of engineers and marketers, and the GameFi craze has also brought game studios into the recruitment pool. At the time, “expansion” took priority over “proof of profitability.”
Beginning in the second half of 2022, the number of new job postings dropped dramatically. Between 2022 and 2023, crypto-related jobs in North America and most of Europe fell by around 40%. The downturn of FTX was exacerbated by the collapse of FTX in November 2022, and the market has not been able to return to peak levels since then.
To assess the current state of cryptocurrency recruitment and interpret market direction from the data, Tiger Research has compiled an exclusive data set of 2,932 active job postings (as of June 2026). The data is collected through manual tracking of web3.career, cryptocurrencies jobs.co, direct recruitment pages of major companies (Greenhouse, Ashby, and Lever), and local Korean recruitment platforms (Wanted and Jobkorea). DAO contributor roles, freelance jobs, and contractual arrangements are not included.
2. Mainstream crypto firms continue to lay off workers in the first half of 2026
The restructuring began long before the first half of 2026. Wisely and Consensys made layoffs in the second half of 2025, a trend that continued to major exchanges including Coinbase, Gemini, Crypto.com, and Kraken in 2026.
March was the month with the highest concentration of layoff announcements for the first half of 2026. A total of six companies announced layoffs in the same month: Gemini, Crypto.com, Algorand, OP Labs, PIP Labs, and Messari. In the first quarter of 2026, geopolitical tension caused by the situation in Iran coexisted with broader market weakness, and companies that needed to reset their strategic direction seemed to use March as a starting point for action.
The reasons for layoffs vary from company to company. Algorand mentioned the macro environment and the decline in token prices. Crypto.com and Gemini point to artificial intelligence (AI) integration. Coinbase announced a shift to becoming an “AI native company.”
For some companies, repeated layoffs eventually led to acquisitions, and the purchase price was only a fraction of their previous valuation. Messari went through three consecutive rounds of layoffs starting in 2023, and was acquired by Blockworks for about $10 million in June 2026. Messari was once valued at $300 million, and its trajectory focused on reflecting the reality of the market.
3. Recruiting is concentrated in specific regions
Cryptocurrency is still an industry with a very high percentage of remote work. Of the active jobs in the first half of 2026, remote jobs accounted for the largest share, at 40.2%, for a total of 1,180 jobs.
Excluding remote roles, office recruitment is mainly concentrated in jurisdictions with established regulatory frameworks or low regulatory unpredictability, including the US (21.8%), Singapore (5.9%), and Hong Kong (4.2%).
The cryptocurrency industry once positioned itself as “borderless,” but as it develops into an industry requiring active regulatory participation and local operations, its recruitment structure is gradually moving towards mature regulatory hubs.
4. Compliance jobs are on the rise
Engineering jobs ranked first among active jobs in the first half of 2026 (accounting for 34.1%, 999 jobs in total), which shows that demand for technology development is still strong despite the contraction of the overall cryptocurrency market.
The more significant change isCompliance and legal positions rank second. In Tiger Research's 2023 Global Cryptocurrency Jobs Report, this category was not listed as a separate statistic,But within three years, it had taken up one-tenth of all active positions.
Within exchanges, this pattern is even more evident. Of the 904 exchange jobs, engineering jobs are leading (275, accounting for 30.4%), followed by compliance and law (145, accounting for 16.0%) and business development/sales (61, accounting for 6.7%). The number of compliance jobs is 2.4 times that of business development/sales positions, which indicates that exchanges are allocating more resources to regulatory defense rather than business expansion.
This trend in compliant recruitment is due in part to the full implementation of the EU MiCA framework (mandatory acquisition of a CASP license from December 30, 2024). European exchanges and asset managers have been expanding their compliance teams over the same period.
The same dynamic occurred in South Korea. Following the implementation of the Virtual Asset User Protection Law in July 2024, domestic exchanges have continued to increase in demand for compliance personnel. This explains why South Korea's share of compliance positions (18.4%) is almost double the global average (10.4%).
The jobs workers most want to automate are also clear.
In a survey conducted by CryptoJobsList, content creation and community management were most commonly identified as functions employees would like to see automated. Both involve repetitive tasks and emotional labor rather than high technical complexity, making them candidates for early replacement. The survey data also indicates that these are the roles that practitioners believe should be replaced first by AI agents (agents). While demand for recruitment is declining, those already working in the field see it as a top automation target.
5. CEX dominance and the rise of the stablecoin industry
The Centralized Exchange (CEX) has 904 job postings, accounting for 30.8% of the total number, accounting for nearly one-third of active jobs. Major exchanges such as OKX (267 jobs), Bybit (138), and Binance (135) are driving the sector's growth.
The stablecoin and payments sector ranked second, with 392 jobs (13.4%). However, Tether alone occupied 224 of these positions (57.1%), and Ripple contributed 104 (26.5%). Together, these two companies account for 83.6% of the industry, which means that the data reflects the concentration of a few large companies rather than broad recruitment growth in the industry as a whole. The situation may be different in the second half of the year. As stablecoin-related legislation progresses in the US, the industry's recruitment environment is expected to change substantially in the second half of the year.
The market making and trading sector reached 101 jobs (3.4%), enough to form an independent sector. Major companies include B2C2, GSR, Keyrock, and Wintermute. This category did not appear as a separate category in the 2023 report. Its emergence reflects the fact that institutional liquidity provision and asset management are deeply embedded in the cryptocurrency market infrastructure.
Gaming and NFTs only account for 71 positions (2.4%). The industry led the market recruitment during the GameFi boom in 2022 and 2023, but its share has since fallen below that of the market-making industry — the latter was still a niche category at the time.
Recruitment within the market is no longer driven by cyclical sensitivity, but is focused on areas that emphasize structural stability: exchanges, payments, and regulatory infrastructure.
6. The crypto recruitment market after AI adoption
In the same period, the AI industry was pointing in the opposite direction. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)'s “2026 Global AI Employment Barometer” analyzed more than 1 billion job postings on six continents and found that in 2025, the number of jobs requiring AI-related skills in the US reached about 1.12 million, an increase of 66% over the previous year, accounting for 2.8% of all jobs.
The cryptocurrency industry is following a similar pattern. The share of cryptocurrency job postings that mention AI skills rose from 23% in early 2025 to 53.1% in March 2026.
In summary, AI is creating new roles in a wide range of industries, and the cryptocurrency market is transforming to higher productivity by streamlining the workforce.
7. The contraction and fragmentation of the crypto recruitment market
The global crypto industry's recruitment market is not only shrinking in size, but the nature of jobs being recruited has also fundamentally changed.
The focus has moved from marketing to regulatory compliance and infrastructure operation and maintenance. Jobs focused on promoting tokens and expanding the size of the community, which were popular during the previous bull market, have been drastically reduced. Meanwhile, demand for talent directly involved in the operation of the underlying systems — whether it's exchange operation and maintenance, stablecoin infrastructure, or on-chain risk management — has remained stable and even increased.
Exchanges with practitioners in this field also confirm this transformation. The project side no longer describes itself as looking for “gambler-like” employees. As the industry passes through a stage where almost no one understood it in the early days, the blockchain sector is now adopting strict, high-standard recruitment guidelines that the traditional financial and fintech industries have long followed.
The changes the crypto recruitment market is experiencing reflect an industry that has passed the speculative stage and is integrating into the mainstream of institutions. This market is no longer looking for people to build skyscrapers, but rather for experts who can build and display real infrastructure.
Appendix
Data sources:Own data (2,932 job listings) — web3.career/cryptocurrencies jobs.co/ Official recruitment pages of each company (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Polymer)/Korean platform manual tracking/manual collection of LinkedIn samples
External sources:
LinkedIn, January 2022: Crypto job postings up 395% vs. 2020
CFTE, 2022: Crypto and Web3 coverage for 67% of new tech hires
Coincub Blockchain Jobs Report 2023: Blockchain ranked in North America and Europe down 40% between 2022 and 2023
LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise 2026
LinkedIn 2026 Grad's Guide: AI Engineers Looking First in Growth; U.S. AI Postings Up 639,000 (AI Engineer up 75,000)
WEF/LinkedIn 2026: AI created 1.3 million new jobs; AI expert roles represented 3% of all LinkedIn postings
CoinDesk, March 21, 2026 (original data: Up Top, William Burleson): new postings in January 2026 down reduced 80% over-year, averaging 6.5 per day
Coincub Web3 Jobs Report 2025:66,494 postings, up 47% under-year, below 2022 peak
CryptoJobsList 2026 Web3 Workforce Report: share of postings considering AI rose from 23% to 53.1%
Web3.career 2025 Intelligence Report: Remote Postings Down 50% Over-Year
GENIUS Act: signed into law by President Trump on July 18, 2025
Tiger Research 2023 Global Web3 Jobs Report
Official layoff announcements by individual companies (2025—2026)
Blockworks acquisition of Messari findings June 12, 2026; Source: layoff data verification
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