The rising popularity of stablecoins reportedly has companies scrambling to hire talent.
As Bloomberg News reported Thursday (Sept. 11), salaries for stablecoin positions are on the rise, with heads of stablecoin strategy roles in the U.S. typically coming with a base salary of $250,000 to $400,000.
This shortage of skills is happening as the stablecoin market is poised for massive potential growth, with some projections showing the digital tokens being used for more than $50 trillion in annual payment flows by the end of the decade, the report added.
“There is a massive gold rush for talent in this space,” said Owen Dearn, founder of FinTech recruitment company Find, who estimated 80% of his hires in the last few months were related to stablecoins.
Bloomberg notes that this is all happening at the tail end of what Goldman Sachs has called “summer of stablecoins,” after the passage of the GENIUS Act in July.
That legislation opened the door for stablecoins to take a larger role in the world financial system, and, the report added, fueled a rush to hire skilled workers, with salaries jumping up to 20% since last year.
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The report adds that while salaries in the $250,000 to $400,000 range are considerably less than what people make in the private equity or AI space, they are in line with compensation for managing directors at corporate banks. It’s an illustration, the report points out, of the way stablecoin jobs have moved beyond the crypto space into mainstream finance.
Writing about this evolution last month, PYMNTS argued that, for a long time, the largest roadblock to wider stablecoin adoption was trust, rather than technology. Crypto’s history of volatility, hacks and failed experiments (from Terra’s implosion in 2022 to the FTX scandal later that year) left mainstream investors soured on the digital tokens.
Traders used stablecoins inside exchanges as a dollar proxy, but few institutions were ready to put them at the center of financial flows. The GENIUS Act, however, changed things.
“By requiring stablecoin issuers to back tokens one-to-one with high-quality liquid assets, primarily Treasuries and insured bank deposits, and subjecting them to federal supervision, Congress effectively gave stablecoins a seal of legitimacy,” PYMNTS wrote.
A recent report by Goldman Sachs found that stablecoins had the potential to become a foundational payment and settlement layer, not just in crypto markets but also in global commerce, remittances and tokenized financial systems.
