7,254 Crypto Jobs Cut This Year — While Security Salaries Hit FAANG Levels

The Grind Catch-Up: what you missed while we were offline. Part 6 of 8.

The crypto job market spent July and August doing two contradictory things at full speed, and which one you experienced depended entirely on your job title.

The cuts

In July 2026 alone, CryptoJobsList recorded job cuts or restructurings at twelve crypto and crypto-adjacent companies, covering 894 disclosed positions.

The largest single move: exchange Luno announced it was cutting around 20% of its global workforce, with CEO James Lanigan citing investment in automation and broader operational improvements.

Year to date, the same tracker counts more than 7,254 disclosed job cuts across 47 companies, with “market conditions” the most commonly cited reason (CryptoJobsList layoffs tracker).

Note the framing shift in that Luno statement, because it’s showing up everywhere: cuts in 2025 and 2026 are increasingly attributed to automation and AI adoption rather than purely to market conditions. That matters for how you plan a career. A downturn reverses. A workflow that got automated does not.

The hiring, at the same time

Now the other half, which rarely makes headlines.

Web3 job postings hit all-time highs in 2025 — roughly 8,000 to 12,000 active global positions, after a 47% rebound in hiring over the year. Demand has jumped specifically in security, auditing and compliance, where roles like smart-contract auditor, penetration tester and compliance officer are reportedly commanding FAANG-level pay.

And the structural observation worth more than any single number: Web3 hiring has largely decoupled from token prices. The old cycle — token up, everyone hires; token down, everyone cuts — has weakened considerably. Firms are hiring against regulatory deadlines, security incidents, and institutional product roadmaps, none of which care much where the price is this week.

So which market are you in?

Roughly, the split looks like this.

Under pressure: generalist growth and marketing, community management at token-funded projects, roles at consumer apps competing for the same shrinking retail attention, and anything an internal tool absorbed this year.

Bid up: security and auditing (see the $1.32B of H1 losses), compliance and regulatory (see the SEC’s proposed framework), institutional infrastructure and fund operations, and quantitative trading.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

The practical advice, if you’re currently exposed to the wrong side of that split:

1. Move toward work with a forcing function. Security hiring is driven by theft. Compliance hiring is driven by deadlines. Both keep going when sentiment doesn’t.
2. Assume the automation framing is permanent. If most of your role is coordination or repetitive production, the version of your job that survives is the one that directs the automation.
3. Specialise into the thin lanes. Firmware security, oracle risk, Travel Rule compliance, fund ops — smaller talent pools, better leverage than joining 400 other applicants for a generalist Solidity role.
4. Read the salary data before negotiating. Ranges have widened enormously by specialism; the same “senior engineer” title spans a very large band depending on the lane.

7,254 cuts and record job postings in the same year isn’t a contradiction. It’s a reallocation. The question is which side of it you’re standing on.

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Browse current openings across security, compliance, engineering and trading at cryptogrind.com.