The Year Of The Blockchain Engineer
As the business world begins its first work week after the Lunar New Year, the Dragonchain Academy team is also looking forward to the start of a promising year within the blockchain and crypto space. The improvements and innovations that emerged from the blockchain community in 2018 have set the groundwork for even greater things to come from our developer community.
With more than 20 years of experience in e-learning and entrepreneurship, Sieng Van Tran, President of the Dragonchain Academy, knows a thing or two about industry growth and believes that this will be the year of the blockchain engineer. Sieng regularly works with partners from around the world, and everywhere he goes, he sees the same common thread: the demand for blockchain developers is pressing and it’s only increasing. Here are the main factors from 2018 Sieng believes will make this the year of the blockchain developer.
Interchain as the Bridge Between Development to Deployment for Blockchain Projects
As blockchain projects mature and come out of development, they begin to be deployed in business and consumer technology stacks. Dragonchain’s Interchain capability provides a vital resource to end users by creating a seamless experience technologies. By connecting to more than 2000 dApps on Ethereum, Interchain gives developers the utility, scalability, and flexibility to securely overcome bottlenecks in the way of deployment.
Education and Training Driven by Demand and Salary
According to hiring and recruiting sites, blockchain engineers make between $150,000 and $175,000 in annual salaries on average. This skill set puts them on par with specialized developers that work in top paid fields like artificial intelligence. Demand for blockchain engineers has increased by over 400%, while job security for these positions ranks among the highest in the industry.
In response to this growing demand for blockchain expertise, universities like Oxford, MIT, and Columbia are beginning to offer both traditional and online courses. While these institutions are learning to adapt to this new material, there are also platforms built ground-up to support blockchain education, platforms like our very own Dragonchain Academy. Our alternative is not only free and accessible to all academic backgrounds, but also provides tokenized rewards in the form of Dragons.
Our growing network of partner academies, accelerators and incubators from around the world will help expand the scope of our learning platform to encompass many more disciplines, subject experts and ways to consume our content.
The Rise of Blockchain in International Markets
One of the most emblematic examples of the increasing demand for blockchain developers comes from Hanwha, a leader in the South Korean insurance market. It created a blockchain task force to successfully carry out their new insurance solution and apply the technology to their business. Hanwha’s task force includes a research and development team with 200 members, which speaks to the importance of blockchain in the eyes of major global corporations.
An even more recent sign of blockchain growth in Asia can be seen in the coworking space and incubator opened by Infinity Blockchain Ventures’ earlier in February. This installation is the largest of its kind in Japan, which bodes well for the future of this technology and its mainstream adoption.
Dragonchain Academy has been working to secure partnerships with global companies such as these in order to support the mutual goal of driving blockchain adoption and literacy across all communities. There are many exciting projects emerging from these companies and it is our mission to equip both the people making them and their potential end users as well.
It is this demand from enterprise customers that increases both the prominence of blockchain developers and the number of on-ramps to become one. Investors, in turn, look at this growth and become more open to funding blockchain entrepreneurs, which leads to more startups that need development resources. This cycle we are currently seeing is the reason why there has never been a better time to start learning and why 2019 is the year of the blockchain developer.
Dragonchan Academy has partnered with NEO to build awareness for the importance of blockchain education and will be collaborating across multiple events. The first will be our Blockchain Seattle meetup on February 13th, in which Sieng will be co-presenting with NEO staff. This will be followed by Dragonchain Academy’s exhibit at NEO DevCon on February 16–17th. If you’re in the Seattle area and want to connect with Sieng or the Dragonchain Academy team this week, email carlos@dragonchain.com to schedule a meeting.
