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If there’s any group in the global workforce that is sitting pretty it’s blockchain developers. Their success has unparalleled with anything in the stratosphere, yet they’re still receiving offers with compensation packages rivaling that of CEO pay packages.

And many of them have already become millionaires from investing in the coins of the market leaders they helped to build, including bitcoin and Ethereum, which means they’re less incentivized to join other projects for the size of the offer alone.


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Decentralized World

The thing to remember about blockchain pioneers is that they set out on the mission of a decentralized world not so that they could be subject to the whims of cryptocurrency prices. They are just as focused on the social impact of the blockchain as they are the success of their respective projects.

Consider Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, who during the peak of the cryptocurrency market rally at year-end 2017 tweeted the following reminder to his followers –

*All* crypto communities, ethereum included, should heed these words of warning. Need to differentiate between getting hundreds of billions of dollars of digital paper wealth sloshing around and actually achieving something meaningful for society. 

https://t.co/aNpEnBNGsA— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) December 27, 2017

Buterin went on to use Venezuela as an example, whose economy is in tatters. He was dismayed that bitcoin’s price posts were getting more traction than “how Venezuelans were being rescued by crypto.”


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If the corporate culture reflected Buterin’s mission rather than dangling a six- or seven-digit compensation package in front of recruits, they might have more success attracting top blockchain talent.

Talent Battle

Meanwhile, blockchain startups are creating roadmaps with product release dates obligating them to have top development talent in-house, all of which is leading to projects getting stuck and helping to fuel the hiring frenzy. It’s not solely blockchain startups, however.

Global corporations including certain FANG stocks are no longer waiting on the sidelines as ICOs raise billions of dollars and the cryptocurrency market cap has balloons to nearly $400 billion, all of which has placed a high bounty on the pool for blockchain talent. If you have any doubts, consider again Ethereum co-founder Buterin.

As Hacked.com previously reported, Buterin tweeted about having received a job offer from Google.

David Schwartz, whose Twitter profile describes him as “one of the original architects of the XRP network,” told The Wall Street Journal how both a startup and a big tech play attempted to poach one of his team members, each of them offering the Ripple developer a million dollar signing bonus.

Meanwhile, the blockchain, a public immutable ledger where transactions are recorded and joined together in individual blocks, has become a catchphrase, one that can mean the difference between hits on a LinkedIn profile or not.

According to the Journal story, there are thousands of available jobs posted on the social platform hunting blockchain talent through the early part of May, reflecting more than a 150% jump versus all of last year.

But just as regulators have said they don’t want to rush into crafting any policy in response to market performance, employers should similarly take a step back before throwing everything but kitchen sinks out to software developers. Some companies are developing talent in-house, which is another route to consider.

But overall, hiring companies could be much more effective at recruiting blockchain talent if they understood the mission behind decentralization.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.


Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade.

Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. 

Social trading platform eToro has analyzed the profiles of its users who invested in cryptocurrencies between March 2017 and February 2018. The report reveals that Ripple (XRP) is the most traded digital currency on eToro’s marketplace.

eToro Reveals Popularity of Crypto-Investment By Age, Gender, And Job Sector

Global trading and investment platform eToro has reported the results of its user data analysis, which revealed the popularity of each top cryptocurrency by age range, gender, and job sector. The results have led to the conclusion that most traders are young and have little to no experience.

Ripple (XRP) is overwhelmingly the most popular digital currency as it leads in all age groups, with nearly a quarter of users having traded XRP in the period under analysis. 

Data confirms what most within the cryptocurrency industry already think: the younger the investor, the more into crypto they are. In descending order, the top 9 digital currencies traded by eToro users are Ripple, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, Dash, Stellar, and NEO.

Over two-thirds of eToro users are have little history with crypto-investment. By occupation, the report found that Computer/IT services professionals are the most common group of cryptocurrency investors, followed by those who declare no occupation, then sales/marketing, students, and finance industry professionals in fifth.

By gender, 91.5% of virtual currency traders using the eToro platform are male. “Fewer women are involved in cryptocurrency investment than their male counterparts, with only 8.5% of all investors being female”, said the report.


The coin breakdown by gender, women are more likely to invest in some currencies than others,except for Bitcoin. The most dominant digital coin by market capitalization has 0% gender difference. From the top 9 digital currencies, Ripple is more traded by women than men by over 2%.Regarding profitability, some strategies are aimed at yielding long-term results and others look for potential quick gains.

Nonetheless, eToro mapped the top 9 cryptocurrencies by average profitability. The chart shows that Ripple (XRP) is the most profitable coin for eToro users, followed by Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum Classic, and Dash. The average investor is at a loss with Neo, Stellar, and Bitcoin Cash.

The leading social trading and multi-asset brokerage company launched its cryptocurrency offering in the United States this month. U.S. based traders are able to invest in 10 digital coins for now, but eToro will expand its trading portfolio throughout the year. eToro USA, which is led by Managing Director Guy Hirsch, is registered as a money transmitter.

Digital currencies were in free fall Wednesday, with some major coins in the red by more than 10%.

Bitcoin, the world’s biggest digital currency, fell through $8,000 late Tuesday and the slide has not abated. Bitcoin tumbled to a multiweek low of $7,442.92.

Bounces have been limited, with a single coin last worth $7,528.89, down 7.1% from late Tuesday Eastern U.S. levels on the Kraken exchange. The collapse in cryptocurrencies has seen the total value of all coins fall to $326 billion, down some $50 billion in just 72 hours, according to Coinmarketcap.

Bitcoin bull Tom Lee of Fundstart Global Advisors is holding firm, telling CNBC that institutional investors are just waiting for clarification of regulation before dipping their toes in the water.

Lee told CNBC that his price target for the No. 1 digital currency remains at $25,000.Read: Crypto crackdown: New Jersey orders 3 firms to stop offering unregistered securities

  It’s just a trend, and the trend is lower  

Bitcoin enthusiasts looking for the next support line might be better off tracking current resistance levels, according to one analyst, who says we are still in a trend, and it’s not higher.“Last week’s $9k support has turned into this week’s $8k support. And thus far it is giving every indication that $7k will become next week’s support.

I hope you see the trend here,” wrote Jani Ziedins in a blog post.“It takes most bubbles between six and 24 months to finish bursting. If bitcoin is like most bubbles, that means the worst is still ahead of us and we should expect lower lows over the next few months.

”Read: Opinion: This is all it would take for bitcoin to become a worthless cryptocurrency

Altcoins shattered

Altcoins, or digital currencies other than bitcoin, are showing hefty losses early Wednesday.Ether ETHUSD, -0.72% has lost 10.6% to $586.00, Litecoin LTCUSD, -0.12%  is down 8.2% at $119.10 and Ripple’s XRP coin XRPUSD, -0.13% is down 10%, last trading at 59 cents.Bitcoin Cash BCHUSD, -0.39% is the biggest loser, currently down 12%, trading below $1,000 at $991.30.

Bitcoin Cash reached a low of $969.20 Wednesday, a fall of 15.8% on the day. At this rate Bitcoin Cash, which had risen more than 100% in April, is on track for its third consecutive weekly loss. Futures finished the day well in the red.

The Cboe June contract XBTM8, -0.95% finished down 6.6% at $7,647.50, while the CME May contract BTCK8, -0.59% closed off 7.2% at $7,590.

CryptoWatch: Check bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices, performance and market capitalization—all on one dashboard

 FEATUREBrady Dale    May 20, 2018 at 15:00 UTC  |  Updated  May 21, 2018 at 12:27 UTC

ICO issuers are starting to look to jurisdictions outside the U.S. to set up shop.In an environment of regulatory uncertainty, where the U.S.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has begun investigating ICOs and the industry surrounding the capital raising technology but has yet to make a formal decision of how it will regulate crypto tokens, issuers and other stakeholders are finding other jurisdictions a better bet for launching their projects.

And no other place during Blockchain Week was the topic hotter than at Token Summit III (the original event took place a year ago) on May 27 in New York City.

Both on stage and off, startup founders, attorneys and investors had strong opinions about how far to go in an environment where enforcement agencies know how easy the market boom for the tokens makes it for malicious actors to spin up a fake company and bilk millions of dollars out of unwitting buyers.

That boom packed venues in New York City throughout Blockchain Week."The reason there's a thousand people here, it's not blockchain technology," Jason Fang of Sora Ventures told CoinDesk, saying he's been going to blockchain events for years and it was all the same faces until the initial coin offering (ICO) boom.

"The difference is money. The difference is speculation."But not everyone felt that hype meant rushing headlong would be the right approach.For instance, Paypal's original chief operating officer and now an investor in Craft Ventures, which incubated and backed the security token platform Harbor, David Sacks spoke to how getting compliance right led cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to be "the first really successful company in the space.

"He wasn't the only one. Throughout the day, different speakers returned to the question of regulation, and from the stage it began to become clear that the rest of the world isn't nearly as complicated as the U.S.

This is perhaps unsurprising - as the world's biggest economy it also has the most rules. Regulators in the U.S. would much rather err on the side of caution, even if that means curtailing some of the excitement.

Laws in the U.S. are based around the Roaring '20s, which led to the Great Depression, Lowell Ness of Perkins Coie explained during a panel on regulation,saying:

"Literally the securities law is intended to exclude the moms and pops from too risky investment."

But other parts of the world take a more open-minded, if not lax, approach and that's luring some ICO issuers overseas.

'ICO tourism'

For instance, representatives from Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Gibraltar spoke to the crowd, both assuring listeners that their nations took an extremely responsible approach without quite the aggressive fretting of U.S. rule-makers.

Speaking for his home country of Switzerland, Andreas Glarner of MME said:

"It's not our task as a regulator to tell people which way they want to lose their money."

Yet judging investments is one thing and willfully manipulating people is another.He added, "If the project is fraudulent we're going to prosecute it.

"Representatives from Lichtenstein argued that the small country has a large enough regulatory staff to work with companies it hosts and help them build businesses that are still within its regulatory framework.

Meanwhile, representatives from Gibraltar said that its regulators have done the work to build rules from the ground up that specifically fit the new world of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Meanwhile, attorneys in the U.S. sound frustrated, but hopeful. Several who have been working with the SEC spoke on a panel about where the country is at in terms of defining rules for the industry."What we're doing primarily is educating the SEC on what blockchain is," Nancy Wojtas, a former SEC staffer now with Cooley LLP, said.

"I think there was just a misunderstanding by them to what cryptocurrency is all about. They hear 'cryptocurrency' and they think 'fraud.'"Ness from Perkins Coie was more hopeful, forecasting forthcoming clarity.

"Now we have a position where there's going to be bright lines," he said. "Full functionality [of a platform] is a very hard bright line to draw. Full decentralization is a bit easier.

"Bloq's Matthew Roszak has also been working through Token Alliance, a Washington DC-based initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, to guide the SEC so that they make decisions that will allow the technology to thrive in the States.

"The last thing I want to do is spend time with regulators, three-letter agencies. I want to build, invest and innovate," he said, noting that he's doing it, though, because he believes it's important.

Wojtas cut through the optimism, again though, stating that entrepreneurs in the space will likely have an uphill battle for some time.She said:

"Being involved in an investigation is like living in hell without dying."

She continued, warning founders about the price of hiring attorneys to answer questions and respond to regulator requests, "You will be spending between $100,000 and $300,000 per month."As such, Sebastian Bürgel of Switzerland's Validity Labs said of companies visiting countries trying to figure out where to domicile (even if its staff doesn't actually work from the country):

"I see what I would call ICO tourism."

Startups' thoughts

At Token Summit III, the room was filled with about two-thirds startups and one-third investors.The startups, including those domiciled in places like Hong Kong and Singapore - attractive places after China's central bank banned crypto token sales - spoke to how they viewed the regulatory environment throughout the world.

Lea Bauer, director of operations at Centrifuge, a startup building a decentralized enterprise resource planning platform, told CoinDesk that her firm is talking to lots of lawyers in the U.S. or Europe before it decides where to land.

Centrifuge envisions a token for services on the platform. And while it wants to execute a good legal plan, it won't wait for absolute certainty.Bauer explained:

"If we wait too long, that gives us complications on the product side, whereas if we move too early that gives us trouble on the legal side."

Kain Warwick, with the Australia-based stablecoin project, Havven, told CoinDesk, "I genuinely don't believe the regulators want to impede what's happening.

"But he also added that risk in his home country "is far less than it is from the SEC," he said.

While geographies seemed a main concern for many ICO issuers, it isn't the only kind of distance that could lower risk. Time could also serve an issuer.Founder of crypto loanmaking platform, ETHLend, Stani Kulechov, told CoinDesk that it did its sale last fall.

"Back then, when we did the ICO, the regulatory uncertainty was pretty vague," he said.

However, his company is based in Switzerland, where the rules are clear enough that the company isn't concerned. Additionally, the fact that it had a working app before doing any fundraising adds to Kulechov's confidence.Just to be sure, though, "We don't accept US customers," he said.

Jae Kwon of Cosmos said similar things of stage, telling the crowd he's glad the company did its token fundraiser before all the ICO hype started."There's too much money piling in," he said. And if you bring in too much money, "they can always sue you, especially in the United States.

"Leonard Frankel, CEO of ClanPlay, an existing gaming company, which is building the Good Game token, in order for gamers to earn money for playing, has a very complicated plan to get both the tax and legal structures he desires.

An Israeli company, Frankel plans to actually launch his tokens out of Gibraltar but then transfer them to Israel and sell them from his home country, so that the company will pay its taxes there.

Erik Buschbaum, CMO of Rlay, a protocol to validate information, said his company is based in Berlin but domiciled in Gibraltar, which works for them by and large.Still, he said, "We have investors right now, Kryptonite1, and they advised us not to do a public sale because of regulatory risk.

"All this said, it's clear the ICO industry is reeling somewhat from both the unclear guidelines throughout the world and the thought that regulators could create rules that make their businesses illegal at some point.Speaking to the fear many have of U.S. regulators, MME's Thomas Linder said:

"The U.S. needs to learn that in a globalized, decentralized economy, they are not the center of the universe anymore."

Token Summit III image (Nancy Wojtas of Cooley, Lowell Ness of Perkins Coie, Lilya Tessler of McDermott, Will & Emory, William Mougayar and Brad Burnham of USV, who is speaking), via Brady Dale of CoinDesk

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/crandym/iStock/WIRED

It is tempting to think that, with the launch of its blockchain research group – helmed by erstwhile head of Messenger David Marcus – Facebook pulled a dead cat move on us.

After months of Facebook-bashing over the Cambridge Analytica scandal— and by extension over Facebook’s failings in terms of data protection and accountability – the company might have used some respite. A few days of bemused speculations on how Facebook could use a blockchain would have provided just that.

But while ongoing psychological-mindfuck-related troubles on both sides of the Atlantic might have played a role in the timing of the launch, Facebook was always bound to dabble in blockchaining at some point. Partly, that’s because everyone else in Silicon Valley is, too. 

Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have recently launched some projects involving blockchain technology; even Apple, in 2017, filed a patent that hinted at its interest in distributed ledgers.

Facebook had tasked a lone corporate development staffer – Morgan Beller – with looking into the subject almost one year ago; this must have seemed a good time to scale up the effort. 

Yet, there is something jarring about Facebook embracing this technology. First designed as the digital scaffolding for cryptocurrency bitcoin, a blockchain is a permanent, public, online ledger that processes transactions relying on a swarm of users’ computers rather than on any single central mediator.

READ NEXT

• To get rich in crypto you just need an idea, and a coin
  
  
  
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  To get rich in crypto you just need an idea, and a coin
  
  

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Pseudonymous bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto was very explicit about his goal of using the blockchain peer-to-peer system to do away with central banks and credit card companies.It goes beyond the financial: people in the blockchain sphere have long been talking about decentralising the web itself.

 They yearn for the fall of centralised technology platforms like Facebook or Google and the rise of online communities that would allow users to connect without entrusting their data to corporate middlemen. 

The benefits of this model would go from resistance to censorship, to more control for users on how their personal information are utilised (think of users controlling their data as if they were units of cryptocurrency on a ledger).

In April, defying irony, former Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser joined IOVO, a blockchain venture that plans to allow people on social media to decide whom they share data with. (Fun fact for conspiracy theorists: essentially all dramatis personae in the recent scandal, from Aleksandr Kogan, to Steve Bannon, to Cambridge Analytica itself, have some sort of cryptocurrency backstory.)

Other blockchain-based social network projects have actually been launched – chief among them Steemit, a platform where users are rewarded with cryptocurrency units instead of Likes – even if none of them has so far risen beyond the status of blip on the chart.

While it sounds far-fetched that Facebook would opt to commit suicide by decentralisation (by either relinquishing control of its users’ data, or smashing its monopoly to smithereens) the company might have decided to know its enemy better, and maybe take a leaf or two out of the blockchain’s book, before a real challenger emerges.


What is the blockchain? WIRED explains





Blockchain

What is the blockchain? WIRED explains

Only one thing suggests there might be more brewing here than a defensive sideshow: the high calibre of people involved. David Marcus is the man that made Messenger the war machine it is today; Kevin Weil and James Everingham, two senior members of the new blockchain division, were key Instagram executives. 

Why would Mark Zuckerberg have this trio of star employees work on an otiose experiment?

This could be another PR obfuscation blinder, or it could be a juicy bit of office politics. As TechCrunch highlighted, both Messenger and Instagram could have improved too much, ceasing to present an intellectual challenge for Marcus and his Instagram colleagues. 

By creating this new toy for them to play with, Facebook might have staved off losing them to companies able to provide them with more excitement.We know that Marcus (like, to a lesser extent, Everingham) is a blockchain believer: a payment specialist and former PayPal president, he has owned bitcoin since 2012, and has often spoken highly of its potential; he recently joined the board of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. He loves this stuff.

Sure, in February, Marcus underlined that cryptocurrency payments were not coming to Facebook (and, specifically, to Messenger, which includes a payment feature) anytime soon: they were still too slow and expensive. 

Now Marcus will be able to have some fun trying out ways to crack the problem, or thinking up other blockchain-powered stuff, in his brand new skunkworks.Maybe something will come out of it after all. 

But you would be safe to bet against a much-rumoured FaceCoin: after its draconian ban on cryptocurrency ads, and its current fallout with governments all over the globe, Facebook does not need to get knee-deep into another regulatorily iffy matter. PR only works so far.

Discover more from wired here: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-blockchain-david-marcus-mark-zuckerberg

 FEATURELeigh Cuen   

"Satoshi is female!"That's how New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney rallied the crowd on May 13 at the "Women on the Block" event in Brooklyn, New York, where more than 300 people came together to talk about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

The event comes at time of tension within the crypto community, as blockchain stars like Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark are urging interviewers to stop asking what it's like to be a woman in crypto.

"Stop marginalizing and write about the awesome work that women are doing," Stark tweeted in February. But to the ladies at the event, it's less about creating a divide and more about a welcome reprieve from the perennial challenge of being treated like a crypto unicorn, when they just want to discuss use cases and applications.

True to that, many of the day's discussions focused on the business opportunities within the space, from using the technology to shine a light on the opaque real estate industry to utilizing blockchain for supply chain management within the food sector.

Nonetheless, the fact is that women are still underrepresented in positions of privilege and power across the board - and the blockchain industry is no exception.Based on findings from an international Quartz survey of 378 venture-backed crypto and blockchain companies founded between January 2012 and January 2018, roughly 8.5 percent had a woman on the founding team, compared to 17.7 percent in the broader tech industry.

And according to many women at the event, this lack of gender parity could hold the nascent industry back significantly."Women have a better understanding and different priorities with this technology," European Parliament member Eva Kaili from Greece told the crowd, adding:

"We believe, with these tools, you can have a strong influence on the future."

A true need

Sure enough, women at the event, including German entrepreneur Masha McConaghy, co-founder of both BigchainDB and the Ocean Protocol, told CoinDesk that women could benefit from blockchain technology, perhaps, even more than men.

That's because women still deal with issues surrounding financial access and empowerment - women make up the majority of the world's poor, according to the World Bank - and a pseudonymous and censorship-resistant system could provide a solution.For instance, in Saudi Arabia, women are still legally barred from receiving a business loan or license until two men testify of her behalf.

And according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, at least 94 percent of women who experienced domestic abuse were also victims of economic abuse, where the abuser controlled her access to income or financial services.

McConaghy told CoinDesk, "We still don't have it [freedom] yet, but we are moving towards it."Echoing that, Nigerian engineer Ese Mentie, who works with ConsenSys on the blockchain identity project uPort, told CoinDesk:

"There are still women whose husbands and fathers are controlling and they can't access their own money."

For her, inclusive corporate practices are the key to building effective blockchain solutions that take these different problems women deal with into account."If there is diversity, those conversations will happen," she said.And that could happen sooner than some expect.

Kaili celebrated the fact that women are rising into leadership roles very quickly within the space, not just in terms of entrepreneurship, but also as it relates to legal research, diplomacy and open-source projects.

That makes sense, she continued, considering the cryptocurrency boom is popularizing conversations women have been having for years about financial access and control.

Focus on education

For many women at the event - who on Mother's Day brought mothers, daughters and sisters - the key to getting more women in the space is education.

Education programs and data-sharing initiatives, like Women Who Code, were hot topics. And it was even proposed that the Women on the Block events should go on the road.Speaking to this on a panel about investing in blockchain technology, Liz Rabban, vice president of business development at Celsius Network, a decentralized lending platform, said:

"The concept of decentralization and empowerment can only exist if we have education."

And these statements about education generally garnered more applause than even Maloney's opening statement about Satoshi [Nakamoto], the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that originally spurred all this excitement.

Still, Kaili was quick to note that the blockchain industry will only "duplicate the problems we already have" if leaders don't prioritize gender parity.

But in knowing the struggles that women in the industry, and even more broadly, face, the tone of the day wasn't discouraged. As a matter of fact, many of the women joked about the current perks of being a minority in the space - including the fact that there's hardly ever a line for the women's restroom.

Women on the Block organizer Alexandra Levin-Kramer promptly quipped:

"Not for long!"

New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney at Women on the Block image via CoinDesk

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.