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As Crypto Reels, Polygon Deploys Cash Hoard in Hiring Binge

(Bloomberg) -- Polygon, whose software makes transactions on the Ethereum blockchain more efficient, plans to expand its overall headcount by more than 40% this year as it moves to capitalize on the woes of other crypto companies.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The company, founded in India and based in Dubai, plans to add some 200 people to teams that operate from remote locations around the world, human resources head Bhumika Srivastava said in an interview.

Some of the new hires will join its ranks of roughly 500 full-time employees while others will be contractors working on projects related to the wider Polygon ecosystem. The company is hiring managers as well as engineers and staff for overseeing partnerships.

This year’s crash in digital assets has led to a divergence of sorts, with many companies that built their business models on soaring prices and appetite for speculation crashing while others, buttressed by money raised before the upheaval, have continued to grow.

Polygon, flush with cash from a $450 million sale of private tokens in February, sees the crypto bear market as a rare hiring opportunity, according to Srivastava. But it isn’t easy, she said: Developers for so-called Web3 projects remain hard to come by and command high salaries.

Read more about Web3, billed as the next World Wide Web

“Overall tech talent is difficult to hire even if it is a Web2 organization,” Srivastava said, using a moniker for companies focused on the current generation of internet services. “It is difficult to hire the quality talent you want, especially as Web3 skills is something that’s still getting built.”

$400,000 Salaries

The slump in crypto prices that began late last year and gathered pace in May and June sent a cascade of defaults and failures rippling through the industry. Companies including Coinbase Global Inc., Bitpanda, Crypto.com., Gemini Trust Co. and BlockFi Inc. have laid off employees in the past few months.

A subset of developers focused on building what’s often billed as the next generation of internet services have been insulated from the carnage, however.

A recent report from LinkedIn and crypto exchange OKX highlighted an imbalance in the supply and demand for talent in the blockchain field, with qualified workers hard to recruit. The average annual salary offered to developers in Solidity, a popular blockchain programming language, stood at $101,000 in August, according to job listing site web3.career. More experienced engineers can command as much as $400,000.

Developers of smart contracts, the pieces of code that automatically execute transactions on blockchains, earn an average of $120,000 and a maximum of $400,000, according to the site.

Polygon lured 30 developers from One Planet, a nonfungible token launchpad which moved to Polygon after the Terra stablecoin project imploded in May. It is in talks to migrate 60 different projects from Terra to its own ecosystem, Srivastava said.

The company has also hired from large technology firms such as Amazon.com Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and YouTube, according to Srivastava, who joined Polygon from Airbnb Inc. Coinbase’s Ryan Kuhel recently joined Polygon as partnerships manager.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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