Cointelegraph has made a comprehensive list of the most useful ways to land a cryptocurrency job - from forums and job search aggregators to Facebook, freelance marketplaces and Angel.co.
The following sources and methods are selected on the basis of practical experience, and the information is up-to-date at the moment of writing this article.
Forums and boards
Any big forum on cryptocurrencies contains a “Jobs” section. There you can find an interesting job offer or a freelance project and publish a post like “looking for a job in a Bitcoin startup”.
There is a lot of rubbish among the offers: offers of partnership, Click-to-Pay, and straightforward fraud.
Sometimes you can find a real treasure. You can get a freelance job at a good American rate, strike up promising acquaintances, and even arrange relocation to the USA, EC or Asia.
However, job offers are updated quite seldom. Usually there are no guarantees of payment. Formal contracts are concluded on rare occasions, so there is a chance that you won’t get paid at all. In most cases, you get offers of one-time (project) work from private customers.
The most interesting resources include:
- Jobs section on Reddit: There are not many offers, a lot of candidates, and reputation on Reddit can affect the choice of a contractor. But, as it always has been in freelancing, the capability to sell your services is crucial. For example, a small but strong team of developers succeeded in finding a number of very profitable orders here, despite the competition.
- Famous forum BitcoinTalk offers a lot of options for job searching: You can go directly to the local Russian thread (this option is suitable for those who do not speak English), and for others, we recommend visiting other threads on the forum (there you can find interesting offers from European and Asian customers from time to time), using the search by word feature with “job”, and looking into the Project Development section.
- Almost everybody here offers payment in cryptocurrency (which is Bitcoin in 99.9% of cases). Job offers for copywriters, translators and content managers are posted here quite often.
- Special board BitGigs is more alive than dead – new job offers are posted here almost every day. Here you can find job offers not only for developers, but for photographers, graphic designers, music editors and experts in video.
Freelance marketplaces and job search aggregators
Unfortunately, the largest and most popular resources like Freelancer.com, UpWork, Fiverr do not provide an option to get paid in cryptocurrency. They just repeat requests and feature requests from clients and contractors and a large number of projects related to cryptocurrencies.
Fiverr is far ahead the others however. In 2014, it added the option to top-up your account balance with Bitcoin, but there was no further progress.
Thus, when you are looking for a job which is paid in cryptocurrency, you will have to forget about the popular resources and turn your attention to special freelance marketplaces.
The special freelance marketplaces are the following:
- The XBTFreelancer.com marketplace appeared in 2015 and actively promoted itself on theme-based resources including BitcoinTalk, but unfortunately it was occupied by clients and contractors from the developing world. For this reason, favorable offers are quite rare here. In all other respects, everything is standard for freelance marketplaces: the most reputable participants and those who have talent to sell their own services get the best orders.
- The Coinality.com aggregator collects requests from several HR resources and freelance marketplaces including UpWork. It is not clear why the latter are even needed, as they do not offer work for cryptocurrency. In all other respects, there are no issues: there is a lot of permanent work offered by unknown and large companies, direct contact details of employers are often published, search for offers by region is enabled, and remote work offers are posted. To find them, enter the “Anywhere” value in the location field of the form.
- BitcoinVacancy aggregates posts and advertisements from other resources and enables direct publishing of offers. Here you can mainly find permanent work for experts in project development.
Cryptocurrency companies and startups
As a nice bonus for employees, the great majority of companies dealing with cryptocurrencies (miners, exchanges, coin casino, etc.) offer payment in altcoins, including HashFlare, for example.
Аngel.co, a platform for startups in search of investment, has opened a Jobs section too. Different projects post their vacancies and search for specialists there.
You can find many options to work for a wage/interest/share in a project, vacancies with relocation, and remote jobs.
Tips for finding a job on Angel.co
Method 1: Filter projects and companies by tags (keywords) Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, or Dogecoin. You will see a table of search results where the “View Jobs” button will be displayed to the right of the companies looking for employees.
Method 2: Go to the Jobs section and filter jobs by the same tags. To find a remote job, add the keyword “Remote OK”.
There is no need to register on Angel.co. Don’t waste your time filling in the profile and don’t get in touch with the startups you liked via this service. There is little point in it unless you took part in development of at least 3 or 5 well-known projects represented on Angel.co, live in Silicon Valley and (preferably) personally know Zuckerberg.
Filling the account form takes a lot of time but companies rarely reply via Angel.co. It is better to go to the respective company’s website, find contact information there and contact them directly. Experience shows that it is much easier to get feedback and come to an agreement in this way.
You can also try to find a company’s contact information on CrunchBase. Go to the search section, use filters “cryptocurrency”, “bitcoin”, then go to the companies’ websites and look for “Jobs” or “Career” sections.
Getting hired via Facebook
It seems that via Facebook you can find everything you want, including work for cryptocurrency.
Alas, it is most likely that a post with an attractive picture (a pretty naked woman holding a Bitcoin in her hands for example) and a text like “Frontend developer looking for a job paid in Bitcoins” will not have much effect.
If among thousands of your friends were those who could help, you would have already asked them for help. But you never can tell. It is Facebook and the famous theory of six degrees of separation.
If it does not work, you can do the following:
- Enter something like “Bitcoin jobs” in the search field on Facebook. You will get a list of topic groups (see an example). Most of them are closed, so you’ll have to contact admins and ask them to add you to the group.
- Tip: in some project descriptions on Angel.co and other similar platforms, you can find links to Facebook profiles of startup founders. Many of them can easily add you as a friend if you send them a request, and others will add you to their friend list when they see other founders among your friends. Then everything is simple: write them a personal message and offer your services, wait until any of your new friends share a vacancy in their project and reply to it, or make a bunch of such friends, and publish a post on the topic “I am intelligent, beautiful, ingenious and looking for a job paid in cryptocurrency”.
More practical tips
Real-life experience is a great thing which helps to warn new job seekers against mistakes and provide solutions, which otherwise would take a long time to come up with.
Here is a number of useful and proven tips that can help you on your difficult way of getting cryptocurrency in exchange for your knowledge and skills:
- Before agreeing to work for altcoins, first learn how to convert them to fiat money and how much you will lose in fees. When you study this issue in details, you will often find out that it is not so rosy and profitable at all.
- Fix your wage in fiat money instead of cryptocurrency. It is a common practice which allows you to secure your earnings, and 99% of employers agree to it. Example: You agree the wage of $2,000 to be paid in Bitcoin at the exchange rate for the date of payment.
- Monitor the exchange rate and do not hurry to exchange all your cryptocurrency at once, especially if your financial situation allows it. It is highly possible that within the next 1-2 weeks, the exchange rate will be more favorable. The only exception is if you get your payment at an exchange rate close to the maximum for the last 2-3 months. Then it’s better sell it all at once.
- Reliable wallet/service for storage of your altcoins is the most important thing for you. Every owner of cryptocurrency can tell their own story of how they failed to rescue their PC flooded with beer, on which wallet files were stored, or could not restore access to the online wallet linked to their lost mobile phone.
By Egor Kotkin