The Demand For Blockchain Engineers Is Skyrocketing, But Blockchain Itself Is Redefining How They're Employed Posted on : Apr 11 - 2018

If you want to keep up on blockchain, you will need to ensure your technical skills are polished. The simplest way? Go work directly with a project that you find exciting. Projects are now directly funding those who have an interest in blockchain programming because there is a severe skill shortage in this space. From beginners to experts. Even though the average salary of a blockchain engineer in Silicon Valley is $158,000, programmers who have experience in Solidity (language for creating smart contracts) is in short supply and high demand.

The Web 1.0 and 2.0 era had the most promising startups hiring fresh computer science graduates from the top engineering schools. UC Berkeley, Stanford and MIT CS grads were in high demand, and difficult to recruit. In the last few years, startups were hiring like crazy from coding schools and bootcamps. There's a seemingly never-ending desire to learn to code. In Hong Kong, founders like Chris Choi of Scribe Intelligence came from finance and Jonah Lau of Clickful came from law. They both devoted their lives to coding schools, started their own startups, and went on to raise funding.

Is studying computer science or attending a coding school the best way to get started programming in blockchain? Lavine Hemlani of Accelerate's coding school believes so. Their blockchain programming in 4-weeks is one of their best-selling courses. Accelerate is seeing both a demand from employers and programmers to develop this skill. No surprise since the market cap for all cryptocurrencies grew from $17.7 billion to $565.1 billion in 2017 with projected growth to $1 trillion in 2018. An even bigger movement is coming to fill the talent gap in the whole new decentralized world. You will see the hungriest talent learning in the real world and working directly with projects.

Funding from bounties and development initiatives

Ethereum has been running a bounty program for developers who find bugs and security flaws since 2015. With ICOs coming into the mainstream in 2016 and 2017, paying those developers in project tokens meant there was real liquidity. Programmers get paid in Ethereum, the value of the token rises, and can cash out on any major exchange.

FundRequest has taken this paradigm to a whole new level with their decentralized marketplace for open source collaboration. Their approach is to get the entire ecosystem involved, starting with users. They can create a request for a feature they badly need or have a bug fixed that they've encountered. A smart contract is generated for that request and a monetary reward is attached. Next, a developer from any skill level and from any part of the world can go in and submit a solution to the request. If satisfactory, that programmer can collect his or her reward.

This approach to getting started programming to blockchain seems to have struck a chord with both the developer community and blockchain projects. Developers who want to move into the blockchain space can use FundRequest to work directly on awesome projects like Request Network, SingularityNET, and Lendroid. With SingularityNET's project being open-source, funding programmers with bounties and development initiatives will accelerate the development of their network and bring coordinated efforts to their AI-developer community. View More