Wall Street Firms Post Dozens of Crypto Jobs — With a Catch

"It's really about domain overlap," Paul Przybylski, global head of product, digital and tokenized assets at JPMorgan Asset Management, said in an interview.

Wall Street firms are looking for crypto talent as they build out businesses that have gotten more welcoming treatment from regulators during the Trump administration. Those range from blockchain-based payment platforms and wealth management offerings, to investment products like bitcoin exchange-traded funds or tokenized money-market funds.

Earlier this year JPMorgan launched a digital-assets team within Przybylski's purview and has plans to debut two tokenized products in 2026. Its hiring plan skews toward engineering and product roles, Przybylski said, but any successful candidate needs to understand governance, controls, operational processes and client expectations at a place like JPMorgan.

"This combination is still relatively small with candidates being strong in one area, but less experienced in the other," he added. "Bridging that gap will take time."

Przybylski is one of several executives and recruiters who spoke with Bloomberg News about the recent hiring wave — which may be small in the context of companies with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, but notable because of the oil-and-water nature of crypto and traditional finance.

Morgan Stanley recently posted many such roles, including an executive director who would support the firm's digital-asset products and services financial crimes program, with a base pay potential of as much as $265,000 a year. BlackRock is looking for a director of digital assets, with compensation of as much as $270,000 before bonus. Bank of America Corp. is on the hunt for a senior engineer for its digital-assets platform offering base pay as high as $200,000. And Fidelity is hiring an engineer for its digital-assets business, paying as much as $255,000 before incentives.

The list goes on: a range of similar roles have appeared recently on hiring boards from the likes of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and Nasdaq Inc., among others. They are drawing attention — perhaps disproportionately so — because the crypto industry itself is still disjointed after a selloff in bitcoin and other tokens that started in October. While prices have improved a bit lately, a number of firms are in distress and several have been cutting staff.

After Coinbase started cutting staff on Tuesday, several of the newly unemployed took to social media to share poignant stories about their time there. Connor Holliman, who described himself as having been an "on-chain recruiter" for the firm, was in a state of disbelief: "i have given my all to @base so this really hurts," he wrote in an X post, referring to the company's Base blockchain.

By contrast, big banks and investment firms are plowing money into digital assets. Bank of America plans to invest $1 billion on payments technology this year, said Mark Monaco, the lender's head of global payments solutions.

"This includes further developing our digital-asset infrastructure and capabilities to help meet client demand and deepen relationships," he said.

Culture Clash

For recruiters like Scott Fletcher, co-founder of Intersection Growth Partners, the trend is a beacon in an otherwise murky hiring landscape. His firm is on track for its biggest year of revenue from traditional financial institutions since its inception in 2018.

"Blockchain, crypto and distributed ledger have been evolving rapidly to be the future of finance as opposed to five years ago," he said.

Yet nearly all of Wall Street's crypto job postings require not just technical expertise, but having spent some time at traditional firms. One of the Morgan Stanley roles, for instance, required a minimum of six-to-eight years in investment banking, corporate development, private equity or similar fields.

Finding that combination is rare, executives and recruiters said. The rules, standards and cultures are often wildly different at buttoned-up financial firms than at their crypto counterparts — which, by definition, were created to challenge the status quo.

"The market is moving from a 'crypto-first' hiring model to an 'institutional-first, crypto-enabled' model," said Sam Wellalage, founder of WorkInCrypto.Global.

His firm is typically running searches for half a dozen senior roles in the crypto industry, often with salaries exceeding $150,000. In recent months, it has generated about $1.2 million in revenue tied to mandates requiring both traditional finance and crypto experience. That's a shift from the last hiring boom, when nearly all of its business pertained to crypto-native hires, Wellalage said.

In fact, WorkInCrypto.Global is in the process of changing its name to Spear Point Search to appeal more to traditional financial firms, he said.

'Mature' Hiring

Job seekers are having a lot less luck inside the crypto industry.

Job postings are down 25% from November, according to data from Blockchain Association, which represents more than 100 of the industry's biggest companies. There are now about 2,200 roles listed there, compared with more than 5,000 on its board during the 2022 bull market.

"What we're seeing is a more mature hiring market," said Dan Spuller, Blockchain Association's executive vice president of industry affairs. "Crypto-native firms are still adding talent, but the 2026 story is really about institutional build-out across ETFs, tokenization, custody, compliance and market infrastructure."

At JPMorgan, its crypto hiring strategy is a blend of recruiting new talent and developing skills in-house.

For instance, the bank recently nabbed Oliver Harris, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive with experience in digital assets, to lead its blockchain division Kinexys. However, more junior roles are more likely to be filled by internal staff who will receive additional training on the particulars of digital assets.

"You can teach a banker how to develop a blockchain," said Umar Farooq, global co-head of JPMorgan's payments business. "But it doesn't always work the other way around."

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