By Natasha Dailey
Big banks have been building up their ranks of crypto experts — and offering huge salary bumps to bring on new talent.
Data from Revelio, first reported by Bloomberg, showed that banks and financial firms including Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo have added 1,000 jobs with the word “crypto” in the description in the past three years.
Goldman Sachs hired 82 crypto professionals, Wells Fargo hired 74, Fidelity hired 68, and JPMorgan hired 63, Bloomberg found. Representatives from Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, and Wells Fargo did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. JPMorgan Chase declined to comment.
In an email to Insider, Revelio said its data is compiled from a “search of online profiles at Banks, Investment Banks and Financial Service Institutions. We count everyone who was hired since 2018, and mentions any variation of “cryptocurrency” or “crypto trading” (making sure not to capture cryptology etc. ) in their job title or job description.”
Those jobs likely came with a sweetener, too. A crypto-related role received a 20%-30% pay bump compared to peers at the same level, with senior crypto roles getting as much as a 50% boost, Bloomberg said, citing data from Johnson Associates. And raises for crypto experts are about 9%, Revelio said.
The slew of hires in recent years are somewhat at odds with bank executives’ public statements about crypto. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, for example, recently called bitcoin worthless, while Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has said crypto wasn’t a big part of the bank’s business. Even so, the bank did add some crypto roles, according to the Bloomberg report.
Meanwhile, bitcoin hit all-time highs near $67,000 in October after US regulators approved the first-ever bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund.
