Along with the spread of coronavirus around the world, panic is also growing. Сoronavirus is smashing the labor market, skyrocketing unemployment and threatening the economy. The authorities are looking for ways to curb the rise in unemployment and prepare for the economic consequences of the epidemic. The global healthcare emergency is disrupting foreign trade. Experts have already warned that the results will be more significant for the economy than the trade war between the United States and China. In conditions where people cannot move freely in their environment and commuting to work is limited, one silver lining is that this experience can help millions of people see the value in the digitalization of the economy, mobile payments and blockchain applications.
Coronavirus is a real problem that will become an incentive for finding high-tech solutions. Although not every fintech innovation can save lives, many of them are now saving money and time, which is also crucial in what has become the age of global unemployment. Besides, the cryptocurrency sphere seems to be the perfect hideaway against the background of recent events. Unlike most enterprises, the blockchain industry is still in operation and providing employees with jobs and wages.
Unemployment facts and figures
With quarantine measures still in force around the world, the number of unemployed is growing. Enterprises and companies are fighting for their existences. Many have had to reduce their staff. In mid-March, hundreds of thousands of people were fired in Spain. The unemployment rate reached 9.3%.
Spain’s job market was also hammered by COVID-19 with more than 800,000 jobs lost in March alone. “Spain has registered an increase in unemployment of 302,265 people. It is not a historical figure in the number of unemployed, but it is in terms of a monthly increase,” Minister of Labor and Social Economy Yolanda Diaz told a press conference. The total number of unemployed exceeded three and a half million.
The British also are facing a difficult situation, despite the fact that the government promised to compensate companies 80% of workers’ wages. The authorities announced that over the last two weeks of March, about a million people applied for social benefits, which is ten times more than usual in the same time period.
Restrictive measures taken because of the coronavirus negatively affected a fifth of the working French. The authorities pledged to pay 84% of their salary to those who were forcibly unemployed.
As estimated by the St. Louis Fed, in the US, businesses might have to lay off about 47 million employees due to the coronavirus economic freeze, which will make the unemployment rate spike to 32%. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard forecast that the unemployment rate will skyrocket to 30%, which is even higher than during the Great Depression. But he is quite positive about what the future holds. “Once the virus goes away and if we play our cards right and keep everything intact, then everyone will go back to work and everything will be fine,” Bullard told CNBC.
Why Blockchain Is Your Dream Job
The world under attack is implementing blockchain, a new technology that is making a valuable contribution to multiple spheres of life. Blockchain is only 12 years old, and the industry is garnering really big investments. This young market is promising rapid growth for companies and individuals alike. Decentralized by nature, blockchain aims to solve trust issues in the economy and is potentially capable of revolutionizing many key areas of human interaction: finance, personal identification, document management, health, the Internet of things, etc. Blockchain is working to eradicate deception from the global economy, and with its principles of transparency, distribution and irrevocability it is coming a long way in restructuring the way the world works.
In 2019, the number of vacancies related to blockchain increased by more than 600%. Almost every employee in the blockchain and crypto industry is a self-taught pioneer. Universities are still just thinking about teaching blockchain-related majors. Well, there are a couple of educational institutions like the University of Nicosia (UNIC), the leading university globally in digital currency studies and the blockchain field. Also, in Spring 2017, the University of Basel offered a lecture series on blockchain, entitled “Bitcoin, Blockchain and Crypto Assets.” Nevertheless, on-hand experience is valued the most when it comes to applying for a real job in fintech or crypto. Therefore, startups and large corporations take many interns and specialists with experience in related fields and are willing to pay them up to 25% above the market.
Types of Employers in Blockchain and Crypto
- ICOs that need specialists with the skills to promote projects in international markets. The initial coin offering boom is over, and ICOs have lost the faith of the crypto community.
- Blockchain startups that build cryptoeconomic infrastructures: platforms, transaction systems, Lightning Network.
- Consortia. For example, R3 consortium is a banking partnership for the study and integration of blockchain in the financial sector. It includes 25 well-known banks and operates on its own blockchain platform Corda.
- Large IT corporations. For example, IBM and Microsoft are investing in blockchain and implementing its innovations.
- Banks and fintech. For example, Icici was the first bank to use blockchain technology. Axis Bank Ltd., and Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. have also been successful in implementing it.
- Government organizations. Here you can find a comprehensive list of public sector blockchain experiments.
- Service companies: insurance, medicine, transport. For instance, the Chinese tracking platform that provides front-line COVID-19 fighters with funding and necessary equipment.
Blockchain Jobs and Salaries
After the MVP (minimum viable product) launch, a team usually expands quickly providing jobs for designers, managers and IT specialists of all kinds. Every project needs employees to do design, front-end and back-end.
Developers
The industry has a very high demand for developers and pays them well. In IT there are a lot of development specialists: web developers, frontend developers with UX design and prototyping skills that make websites for ICOs and backend developers with technical director skills that are responsible for security. Solidity developers work with Solidity, the Ethereum smart contract language. Blockchain developers are required for projects with their own blockchain, such as Golem, Waves, Steemit / Golos. Most blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, Ripple, Hyperledger, are written in C ++. A full stack developer with 6 years or more experience can get a salary in the $100k – 120k range working remotely. Alternatively, you can find an internship compensating 1-2% of Ad Revenue payable in crypto.
Designers
UX designer. This specialist has to make landing pages for blockchain projects. Templates aren’t used for security reasons, so the work will include both prototyping and layout. Contracts with designers are typically signed for the length of the whole project. After a project launches, a design team can be replenished with an illustrator who will draw up all the project materials in a corporate style, and a UI designer to develop the application interface. Crypto media is generally considered a great place to work by illustrators and infographic designers. Nervos Network is currently hiring a remote full-time UX/UI designer for $48K – $96K. For comparison, in 2019, Berlin-based Gnosis hired a full-time UX/UI designer for €45K – €55K.
Testers
Testers look for vulnerabilities in smart contracts and test sites, wallets and exchanges. Blockchains have test networks, you can use them and report bugs for a fee. Also, testers can give themselves a heat check by going through “classic bounty” programs, which are vulnerability search programs for rewards in the cryptocurrency space. Software and smart contract testers don’t have a salary maximum. For example, in March 2014, Coinbase launched a Bug Bounty Program offering an average bounty of
$100-$200 to anyone who finds a vulnerability in their system.
Jobs in marketing, management, PR, editing and law
Blockchain projects need marketers and managers who understand the ideas underpinning decentralization, the shared economy and open source. These positions are also better-paid compared to similar jobs outside IT.
How to Make (and Save) Money on Cryptocurrency
We understand not every person can kickstart a career in blockchain. But you can use various schemes and strategies to earn money on crypto. Some methods require financial investments and imply serious risks. Of course, most users are interested in ways of making a profit that don’t involve cash investments, so we will start out by laying those out for you.
Micro-earnings: Bitcoin faucets, small tasks
This is one of the cheapest and easiest, but also most labor-intensive ways to make money with cryptocurrency in 2020. Micro-earnings involve performing small tasks in exchange for crypto tokens. Bitcoin faucets are the most well known source of micro-earnings. These are sites that pay you for completing certain tasks. As a rule, on sites like FreeBitco.in you get a small number of coins in exchange for completing an action like viewing ads or solving a simple task. Other high-rated services are Bonusbitcoin, Moon Bitcoin, AdBTC, etc.
You should understand that the total revenue you can pull from such portals is very small. Even if you view ads non-stop, you will earn an average of 5-40 cents per hour. Most likely, these are not the kind of earnings that will be worth the time spent.
Airdrops
An airdrop is a free distribution of coins that new crypto projects use in order to increase their level of product recognition and attract investment. You can find information about upcoming Airdrops on special forums like BitcoinTalk, Airdropalert, etc., as well as on social networks and Telegram. Each Airdrop involves the distribution of coins under certain conditions. Some projects give out their coins only to holders of a particular cryptocurrency. And some give out their tokens in exchange for small advertisements of their project.
This method still works, and in theory, using it, you can pick up some digital coins.
But in practice, they distribute very small amounts of crypto. Therefore, the maximum benefit from airdrops is to build up your skills in working with a cryptocurrency wallet.
Economy Tips
You can save your crypto by using services that provide fee-free transactions inside their ecosystems. A good example is Freewallet, a cryptocurrency wallet developer, that has also opened off-chain exchanges by joining forces with Changelly, a non-custodial instant cryptocurrency exchange. The benefits of off-chain transactions are that users only have to pay for the exchange of their assets, without having to pay any transaction fees because off-chain exchanges don’t touch upon the blockchain itself. Using this tip, you can get better rates and enhanced anonymity. Read this article for more advice on the ins and outs of crypto wallets.
Investing
When we talk about investing in cryptocurrencies, most often we are talking about hodling. This way of investing involves buying tokens at low prices and holding them until the market goes up. In fact, this is the most universal cryptocurrency earning scheme in 2020 for those who have assets that they want to tap into. If you think that investing in cryptocurrency means “buy today and get profit tomorrow”, you are totally wrong, no offense. It doesn’t work like that, especially in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. With Bitcoin reaching new lows, everyone realized that this asset is really hard to predict. Nevertheless, even in the pandemic market, there are a lot of extremely interesting altcoins that you might consider investing in.
To make money on investing in cryptocurrencies, you need to do 3 things:
- Study the market and understand how major cryptocurrency exchanges that have many trading pairs, such as Binance, HitBTC, Huobi and Kucoin, work, as well as select coins for your portfolio and monitor them.
- Have free funds to buy cryptocurrency. Never invest the money you can’t afford to lose.
- Be psychologically stable and consider your investment plan, which involves entering the market at a certain price and exiting it after reaching your planned profit level. Otherwise, you risk becoming a victim of market manipulations.
Crypto Mining
Due to the May Bitcoin halving, miners are having a really hard time. The fact is that mining in 2020 requires extremely expensive equipment, high energy costs and nerves of steel.
During the pandemic-caused market decline, few miners have been able to remain afloat and continue to generate income. Nevertheless, mining did not die, it simply became a long-term investment. A possible strategy here is accumulating cryptocurrency with an eye on further market growth. Cloud mining is the technology of choice for those who want to earn crypto, but are not ready to invest money in mining equipment. You pay a third-party company for managing mining equipment and at the same time get profit from it. In the market, there are a few reliable companies providing such services. Two of them are Genesis Mining and Hashing24.
Cryptocurrency Trading
If you don’t want to wait too long for possible profit and want to earn on crypto here and now, then you can try to trade cryptocurrencies on exchanges. Though the current state of affairs may be alarming, keep in mind that traders can earn both in a growing and in a falling market. They use price fluctuations in their favor and choose cryptocurrencies with high volatility when the price can change by 5%, 10% or even 15% within one day. But if you have enough experience, there are more options to cash in on trading. For example, most exchanges give experienced traders a chance to take part in trading contests with large prize pools.
Successful trading is not a matter of luck or guesswork, but learning how to trade and how to overcome many of the risks associated with trading. Although those who are still poorly versed in cryptocurrency trading can also use copy-trading. This method works by copying transactions of individual traders on the exchange. If you understand that the transactions of a particular trader are most often successful and profitable, you can use part of your assets to copy the transactions of that trader. Thus, on the one hand, you will have the opportunity to analyze and catch the logic of more experienced traders working with specific assets on the exchange and learn to trade, and on the other hand, you will get the desired profit from the transaction. If you aren’t willing to invest real money but still want to dip your toes into trading, use your quarantine time wisely and learn to trade with a free crypto exchange simulator. In this article you’ll find a full overview of the top 5 most popular demos.
Conclusion
The topic of cryptocurrencies is still omnipresent in the news even with all the issues stemming from the pandemic. This industry is rapidly expanding and developing, and society no longer perceives Bitcoin as an instrument of criminals and the black market. Even governments and banks are competing in their adoptions and applications of blockchain technology. Non-techies gradually are becoming aware that cryptocurrencies are not an exotic hobby for a handful of IT professionals, but a serious industry in which huge amounts of money are circulating and qualified specialists are in demand. While blockchain projects are helping the world fight the coronavirus pandemic, the blockchain industry might help specialists with different backgrounds find their calling in life and shape a better future together.
If you intend to work in the field of cryptocurrencies, then you will not have problems finding vacancies in this industry. Since cryptocurrencies are a relatively new direction, there are few specialists with extensive experience in it. Many people are now studying cryptocurrencies and blockchain and improving their knowledge and experience. Working in crypto involves overcoming difficulties, learning new things and doing the impossible. If you are not ready for this challenge, then working in blockchain and crypto is not for you. You must decide for yourself whether you are ready to make the sacrifices necessary to understand this new technology. If the answer is yes, then go for it!
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