Even with most tokens posting significant gains this year, several crypto firms are still reeling from the contagion effects of 2022. As such, some of the biggest web3 companies, including Polygon, Dapper Labs, Coinbase, Crypto.com, etc., have declared job slashes this year to mitigate their financial woes. However, a handful of firms have managed to buck this trend and are preparing to go on massive hiring sprees in the coming months.
Here’s a quick round-up of these firms and their ambitious expansion plans.
Circle to increase its workforce by 15 to 25 percent
Circle, the issuer of the USD Coin (USDC), is looking to increase its workforce by 15 to 25 percent. The company has been consistently adding to its employee strength since 2021. It doubled its headcount from 450 at the end of 2021 to 900 by the end of 2022. And now, the latest round of hires would see its workforce increase by 135 to 225 employees. The announcement to expand its workforce comes just a month after Circle cancelled its plans to go public with Concord Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). This deal was announced in 2021, with Circle valued at $4.5 billion. The valuation was even increased in Feb 2022 when Circle ballooned into $9-billion-company.
However, Circle’s plans to go public have been shelved for now. Company CFO, Jeremy Fox-Green, has stated it is still an option that the company could explore when market conditions improve. For now, Jeremy believes that the crypto industry needs to distance itself from the Luna and FTX collapses before appealing to public-market investors.
Ripple is looking to build its engineering team
According to its career page, Ripple had 76 job openings at the time of writing. A large chunk of these openings was for engineering roles, along with several other opportunities in sales, human resources, design, legal, finance and ops. The locations also varied, with openings in India, Canada, the U.K., Singapore, Australia, and the U.S.
Mastercard looking to add 500 more employees
Payments giant, Mastercard, is looking to hire 500 employees for its upcoming crypto and digital currencies consulting arm. The announcement was part of the company’s Feb 15 blog post, titled “Mastercard expands consulting with practices dedicated to crypto, open banking and ESG.”
Mastercard has offered consulting services for several years now and currently employs 2,000 employees for the same. Now, with the upcoming addition of crypto consulting services, Mastercard plans to add 500 more college graduates and young professionals to its team.
Binance is looking to increase its workforce by 15-30% in 2023
The world’s largest crypto exchange has very ambitious plans for the year. An article by Bitcoinist, which was also reposted by Binance, states that the exchange is looking to increase its workforce by 15 to 30 percent. This will add to the 5,000 employees Binance brought on board in 2021. What’s also impressive is that the exchange has not announced any layoffs in the last few months, despite most of its counterparts letting go of employees en masse. At the time of writing, the company had nearly 500 openings on its website.
Dubai’s crypto regulator looking to increase its workforce by 4 times
It’s not just crypto exchanges and payment firms looking to build their human resources. Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) plans to quadruple its workforce in response to the hundreds of license applications it has received in the last few months. Dubai is pushing to become an Asian crypto hub. This has caused crypto firms to flock to the gulf state, putting a huge burden on VARA and hence the need to expand the team. VARA was established in March 2022 and currently has about 20 employees.
Source: CNBC TV18
