With the establishment of cryptocurrency markets, companies have started looking for legal talents.
According to a recent Bloomberg Law article, since the various cryptocurrencies are moving out of the regulatory gray markets, legal hiring may soon get hot in demand. The Bloomberg publication interviewed various experts following the news of Coinbase. It said that Paul Grewal, the former vice-president and deputy general counsel of Facebook, was tapped as their legal team leader by Coinbase.
The consensus is that the number of in-house hires of legal advisers in the cryptocurrency market is likely to scale up significantly, very shortly. This is because of the active push to the market in the financial mainstream.
To be specific, the Chief Legal Officer of the Cryptocurrency Exchange Kraken, Marco Santori, informed Bloomberg that they are going to double the company’s legal team by 2021. He sees cryptocurrencies being serious about participating in international discourses surrounding the development of crypto law. To this, he added, that the current lack of specific laws is making the industry very appealing, especially for the lawyers who are experiencing an active intellectual challenge.
Mentioning the 2016 acquisition of the blockchain startup Glidera, Santori said that Kraken has been remarkably efficient in acquisitions in the past and will continue the legacy. He focused on aggressive hiring and inclined towards the legal advisers.
There is no definitive legal framework in most countries until now, and they are trying to work on it through different experts and advisers. Stuart Alderoty, Ripple’s General Counsel, stressed his point in a conversation with the Bloomberg journalists that the industry is in urgent need of smart regulation, which both fosters and recognizes the potential of this technology.
2020 has seen many vital examples indicating the entry of Crypto markets in the financial mainstream. News is circulating about Coinbase getting listed on the stock exchanges. If this happens, it would be the first time a crypto exchange would be listed on conventional markets. There is also news that a new legal counsel lead was brought in Coinbase to maintain good relations with financial regulators.
Institutional investors have increased their crypto investments significantly in recent years.
Gemini and Coinbase have been taken as customers by JP Morgan Chase. It has even built a self blockchain settlement service, with its own US-Dollar backed token, dubbed as JPM Coin. It is the same US Banking giant whose CEO once said that Bitcoin is simply a fraud.
Global payment giant PayPal is also hiring crypto talents. Rumors suggest that the platform is going to enable crypto purchases for its 305 million users worldwide. There are various job requirements in PayPal for engineers with skills that could overlap Bitcoin development, like experience with cryptographic libraries, experience with C++, and asymmetric cryptography.
However, engineers are not what they need now. They are looking for lawyers to expand in the crypto market and gain the support of the authorities and other organizations around the world.