Denis Omelchenko & Olivia Capozzalo
January 19, 2026

gm Defiers!

Today’s big story:

Crypto hiring is off to a weak start this year, with early January data showing a sharp drop in new job postings compared with this time last year.

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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$92,998	-2.29 %
Ethereum	$3,210.69	-3.93 %
BNB	$925.01	-2.68 %
XRP	$2.02	-1.82 %
Solana	$133.9	-5.81 %

Today’s Big Story

Crypto Job Market Cools Fast in Early 2026

Crypto hiring is starting 2026 on a weak note, with early January data showing a sharp drop in new job postings compared with this time last year.

In a Jan. 15 post on X, William Burleson, a partner at crypto recruiting firm Up Top, noted that December only saw a few isolated layoffs and hiring held up reasonably well through Q4 2025.

But things slowed quickly once the calendar flipped. Looking at key crypto-only job boards — and excluding company career pages or tools like Lever and Ashby — Burleson found just 85 to 90 unique new roles posted in the first two weeks of January.

The number of crypto jobs since Q1 2025 vs. January 2026. Source: X

That’s a big contrast to January 2025. Back then, the first two weeks were running at roughly 38 new jobs per day. So far this year, it’s closer to 6.5 a day, putting hiring activity down about 80% year over year.

The mix of roles helps explain what’s going on. About 60% of postings are technical or engineering roles, with the rest split across non-technical and go-to-market jobs, Burleson says. Most of them skew senior, with staff, senior, lead and head-of roles making up around two-thirds of openings.

Crypto hiring website web3career confirms this, noting in its “Intelligence Report 2025” that the job market now has a “pronounced experience bias that creates unique advancement opportunities for mid-level professionals ready to position themselves strategically.”

Experience requirements are also high. Burleson says most roles ask for at least five years of experience, jumping to seven or more for leadership positions. As for what teams are actually hiring for, the focus is pretty narrow, with roughly 60% of roles coming from infrastructure teams, stablecoin projects, and payments or fintech-style startups.

Well-known crypto projects that have implemented widespread layoffs this month alone include Mantra, Polygon Labs (reportedly) — following its major M&A move — and Berachain, which said in its year-end update it had laid off “most of our retail-focused marketing team.”

Bitcoin, meanwhile, is down 8% on the year, and that certainly can’t be helping things.

Denis, staff reporter at The Defiant

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