How much does a blockchain developer earn?
Blockchain is booming. Bitcoin has done a lot of the outreach work for this new technology, igniting the public’s imagination and making many aware of blockchain’s existence. But decentralization is still a tough industry to be in. For businesses, there seems to be a shortage of skilled decentralized application developers.
And that’s because there is. How do you become a decentralized application developer anyway? It’s not like becoming an engineer where there is a clear-cut path through university to a good job. Most decentralized application developers today have earned the title through experience and experience alone. This shortage in talent, alongside increasing awareness and interest in the blockchain, has put decentralized application developers in high demand.
According to one recent report on the development of blockchain, Toptal, a marketplace for on-demand tech talent, saw demand for blockchain engineers grow 700% from January 2017 to January 2018. The high demand and the competition have led to high salaries for decentralized application developers and other professionals.
Data from Indeed.com indicates that decentralized application developers are currently paid an average of around $110k per year. But there are some disparities depending on where that job is and who it’s for.
Legacy firms are adopting decentralized technology at a faster and faster pace, with IBM leading the pack. Most of these companies and the blockchain positions with them are located in the U.S., mostly in New York and San Francisco. Employees in these positions earn the most, enjoying all the benefits of working for large, well-developed companies will abundant resources.
However, as blockchain continues to grow, a lot of the excitement is with the startups that are employing developers to produce unique new products. These generally pay less than the legacy firms, but they may offer more exciting opportunities and valuable experience. San Francisco is the number 1 hotspot for blockchain-based startups followed by London, New York, and Berlin.
Freelancing is also a reliable way for decentralized application developers to find good income through sites like UpWork, where blockchain developer is the second-most-sought-after position behind robotics expert. decentralized application developers on UpWork generally charge upwards of $150 per hour.
But even with the high salaries, demand for decentralized application developers remains higher than supply. More and more businesses are looking for ways to include blockchain solutions into their operations and products. PAI offers an easy way to pick up the slack and provide decentralized application solutions where developers are hard or expensive to come by.
Think of PAI as a group of bots, each with its own individual function. Businesses use PAI to create a decentralized solution by choosing and piecing together their very own configuration of bots to fulfill their specific needs — no need for developers. Now there’s finally a way for decentralization to grow without depending on the limited number of developers.
