Nine Years in Digital Assets: Who's Hiring Now, and Why It's Not Who You Think

Nine Years in Digital Assets: Who's Hiring Now, and Why It's Not Who You Think

Date: 05 Nov 2026

We started placing blockchain engineers in 2017. Back then a crypto hire meant a Solidity developer for a token project with eighteen months of runway and a very active Telegram group.

Nine years later, the biggest digital asset hiring budgets sit inside banks, asset managers and payment networks. Crypto-native firms are still hiring, but more and more they are hiring to sell to those institutions, or to pass the same regulatory tests.

That shift has changed who we work with, which roles we fill, and what a great candidate looks like. Here is what we are seeing, and how we have set ourselves up for it.

The Market Moved. Most Recruiters Didn't.

Wall Street stopped experimenting. JPMorgan's Kinexys division, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Citi and Bank of America have all posted digital asset roles this year, concentrated in tokenization, custody, stablecoin settlement and compliance (FinanceFeeds). BlackRock has advertised a Director of Digital Assets role paying around $270,000. These are not innovation labs. They are business lines with permanent headcount.

Regulation pulled the trigger. The GENIUS Act was signed in July 2025 and takes effect on 18 January 2027, whether or not the implementing rules are finished (Finjobsly). MiCA is live across the EU. In Australia, ASIC now treats stablecoins, wrapped tokens and tokenized securities as financial products that need an AFSL, and the Digital Assets Framework Bill brings exchanges and custody platforms into the financial services regime (The Block). Every one of those dates is a hiring deadline for somebody.

The crypto-native side is back, but it looks different. CryptoJobsList reports that job postings tripled between July and September 2026 while applications fell by about 27% (CryptoJobsList). More jobs, fewer people applying. Tiger Research found AI skills mentioned in 23% of crypto postings in early 2025 and 53% by March 2026, and compliance hiring growing even while overall crypto hiring shrank (Tiger Research).

The bottleneck is people. Speaking at Meridian on 30 October, Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov said banks cannot move tokenization from pilot to production because they do not have the blockchain engineers and digital asset specialists to do it (report).

Here is the part most people miss. Both sides of the market want the same person: someone who has shipped on-chain, and who has worked inside, or sold into, regulated finance. That overlap is small. It is where we spend most of our time.

The Roles We're Filling

Compliance, legal and risk. The unsexy hire became the one everyone is fighting over. MLROs, Chief Compliance Officers, Heads of Regulatory Affairs, people who can work across MiCA, the GENIUS Act and an AFSL in the same week. Société Générale's New York digital assets compliance advisor role pays $126,000 to $214,000 and asks for GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act knowledge by name (SocGen careers). Solidus Labs found 88% of large US banks opened or filled senior digital asset compliance, legal or risk roles inside a six-month window (Solidus Labs). If you are good at this, your phone should be ringing.

Institutional sales and business development. Sellers who can get a deal through Tier 1 procurement and talk custody, settlement and tokenization without a script. There are not many of them, and the stablecoin issuers and tokenization platforms all want the same ones.

Product. Tokenization product leads and stablecoin product managers. This is not the same job as crypto product management. The use cases are payments and settlement, the sign-off goes through legal and risk, and the customer is a treasury department, not a retail wallet.

Finance and treasury. Stablecoin reserve management, tokenized fund operations, custody operations, digital asset audit and reporting. These disciplines barely existed five years ago. Now they need people who have done them inside a regulated balance sheet.

Engineering. Still our biggest category by volume. Rust, Solidity, ZK, custody and key management, and anyone who can build AI on top of on-chain systems. The difference now is who is competing for them. When a bank starts bidding for your Rust developer, every protocol in the market feels it.

Executive and board. Heads of Digital Assets inside banks and asset managers. Directors for newly licensed entities in Dubai, the EU, Australia and Singapore. CFOs and General Counsel for firms that have just become regulated and need someone the regulator will take seriously.

Who We Are

CryptoRecruit has done one thing since 2017: hire for crypto, blockchain and digital assets. We were placing people before the first spot ETF, before MiCA, and before any bank had a tokenization team.

That timing matters more than it sounds. The network we built when this industry was small is the network the institutions are now trying to hire from. We know who shipped what in 2018 and 2019, and where those people are now.

How we work. Three ways, depending on the hire:

• Retained search for senior, regulatory and confidential appointments. A named lead, a market map, weekly reporting and a replacement guarantee. We do not advertise the role unless you want us to.
• Contingent search for engineering and mid-level hires, and for teams scaling at volume. Fee on placement.
• Advisory for banks, asset managers and fintechs standing up a digital assets function for the first time: which roles to hire first, what they cost in Sydney, Dubai, London and New York, and where the people actually are.

No fluff, no filters. If a brief is unrealistic we will tell you on the first call, not after six weeks of CVs.

Core Team

Neil Dundon, Founder. Neil has spent more than 20 years in recruitment and education. He started in tech at Microsoft and Dell, moved to Australia, launched his first recruitment agency three years later, and then built an education business to more than 50 staff in its first year. He founded CryptoRecruit in 2017 and leads our executive and institutional work.

Jacqueline O'Shea, Senior Talent Acquisition. Jacqueline runs searches across our live client mandates, from engineering and product through to senior commercial hires.

Shane Buckley, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager. Shane works with clients on senior and specialist hires, and manages the candidate relationships that make confidential searches possible.

Behind the core team sits a dedicated team of resourcers who map the market, track who has moved where, and build the long lists our consultants work from. It is why we can put a credible shortlist in front of a client quickly, even for roles where the global candidate pool runs to a few dozen people.

Every consultant owns a practice area rather than a job board, so when you call us about an MLRO search you talk to the person who knows the MLRO market, not whoever picked up the phone.

What We're Working On Right Now

A crypto payments and banking platform in Dubai is building out its product and engineering team, and we are running the search. Live roles include a Senior Product Designer, a Senior AI Developer, a QA Automation Engineer and a Mobile Developer. Alongside the advertised roles, we run confidential senior searches that never appear on a job board. Two typical briefs: a Head of Compliance and MLRO for an exchange going through licensing in the UAE, and a Head of Digital Assets for a traditional asset manager building its first tokenization team. If you are the right person for something like that, you will not find it on LinkedIn. Talk to us.

We are also hiring ourselves: a remote recruitment consultant role where AI agents map the market and you own every candidate conversation. If that sounds like you, it is on the jobs page.

If You're Hiring

• Speed still wins. Good candidates are holding more than one offer. A six-round process is a rejection letter with extra steps.
• Know who you are competing with. If you are a bank, your Rust developer is not comparing you to another bank. They are comparing you to a protocol with equity and no dress code. If you are a protocol, your compliance lead is comparing you to a bank with a pension.
• Put the salary in the first conversation. Candidates who have to chase it have already moved on.
• Keep senior searches quiet. Advertising a Head of Digital Assets role tells your competitors your strategy. Run it confidentially.

If You're Looking

• A TradFi background is no longer a liability. It is exactly what most of these teams are missing. Lead with it.
• Compliance people, the market is yours. If you can work across MiCA and US federal frameworks, negotiate accordingly.
• Engineers, learn the regulated side. Knowing how custody, settlement and reporting work inside a bank moves you into a much smaller and better-paid pool.

Nine years in, this is the most interesting this market has ever been. Real regulation, real institutional capital, and a real shortage of people who can work in both worlds.

If you are hiring, brief us on a search. If you are looking, browse our live roles or get in touch.

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