Current Supply And Demand Of Blockchain Jobs

According to multiple reports by journalists and analysts, Bitcoin is dead — and its trend has declined by more than 350 times. (In that list, you’ll also find a number of obituaries for blockchain and crypto.) With these articles coming every year since 2010, perhaps the analysts are a bit off.

As the debate about the merits and demerits of cryptocurrency and whether blockchain is fad technology among some industries continues, we studied the US Indeed data to see whether tech talent is still interested in the blockchain technology — and whether employers are still hiring.

So with searches for crypto, blockchain and Bitcoin jobs down 67% from 2018 to 2019, has the job market for blockchain and crypto actually started to go by the wayside?

Jobs Up, Searches Down

But on the contrary, why has job seeker interest slid so far from February 2018 to February 2019? Well…

So while job seeker interest dipped quite a bit since last year as bitcoin’s price slid, the share of searches related to crypto and blockchain is still up 553% from 2016 to 2019.

While there have been dips in the share of job postings, crypto and blockchain roles have steadily increased since 2016. Though Bitcoin launched in 2009, companies only started to seriously look at implementing blockchain beyond currency a few years later.

But we the share of employer interest group went up in mid-to-late 2016, and that’s shortly after the tech giant IBM announced its “Bluemix Garage,” setting itself up for the Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) market.

For the matter of fact, the share of job postings for blockchain and crypto is up 4,086% from 2016 to 2019, which a tremendous increase. That’s mostly due to the banking industry have started investing in blockchain heavily because it brings down costs while increasing transparency as well as speed and safety in storing and transmitting data.

As of late 2018, three-quarters of banks were either adopting or looking into blockchain technology.

For the first time, the number of jobs per million exceeded the number of searches per million in the blockchain space. It is quite reasonable to assume that if bitcoin drops dramatically again, a person looking for a blockchain role would eventually have less competition than they would have had after a large increase. There also does appear to be a skills shortage as enterprise projects have matured and developed over the last three years.