Solana memecoin craze drives up demand for Rust developers

Author: Brayden Lindrea, CoinTelegraph; Compiler: Baishui, Golden Finance

The CEO of the Cryptocurrency Recruitment Board said that the Solana memecoin craze that began in the first half of 2024 has led to an increase in demand for Rust engineers.

CryptoJobsList CEO and founder Raman Shalupau noted that this may be driven by "the Solana memecoin craze, where Rust is the main programming language,", adding:

"This is also driven by broader technology trends, with Rust becoming a popular systems programming language and many blockchain companies adopting it to write high-performance distributed systems."

Solana memecoins currently have a total market value of $6.28 billion, far higher than Ethereum's Layer 2 Base memecoin market value of $1.2 billion, according to CoinGecko data.

Since the launch of the Solana blockchain in March 2020, Rust has begun to take some attention away from Ethereum’s Solidity as a programming language for writing smart contracts.

CryptoJobsList’s website shows 99 Rust developer job openings, compared to 45 for Solidity.

“In the last 3 months alone, we’ve seen 32 jobs related to the Rust programming language,” Shalupau noted.

The increase in Rust jobs prompted a 12-month high of 564 crypto job postings on CryptoJobsList in July, an increase of 109% from the previous month.

CryptoJobsList Monthly crypto job postings since August 2023. Source: CryptoJobsList

Kevin Gibson, founder of cryptocurrency recruiting firm Proof of Search, said he’s also seeing more demand for Rust engineers and developers:

“We’re seeing a big increase in demand for senior full-stack developers with experience in Rust, Python, and Ruby on Rails, as well as senior engineers who can step into a CTO role.”

Gibson believes that when Bitcoin hits $100,000, “FOMO” (fear of missing out) hiring will kick in.

Gibson noted that as budgets remain very tight, those who have held onto positions during the bear market will receive multiple job offers that are 30-50% higher than their current salary.

Salary data from CryptoJobsList shows that the average salary for cryptocurrency employees is $88,000, while the top 10% of employees make $165,000.

Meanwhile, Neil Dundon, founder of CryptoRecruit, noted that his company had seen a slight decrease in demand for developer positions, but an increase in demand for sales-related positions.

“It’s still a competitive job market at the moment, but it’s very reassuring to see such high stickiness among web3 candidates. They really want to work in this exciting space.”