The real crisis in an industry is never a lack of money or users, but rather an increasing scarcity of exceptional talent who believe they can still create the future here.

Written by: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

In recent years, what the crypto giants have lacked the least is money. After experiencing the collapse of FTX, tightening regulations, and several rounds of market reshuffling, it is difficult for the surviving crypto giants to explain their predicament with a "lack of money" — they have vast user bases, mature infrastructure, and sufficient cash reserves to keep acquiring and investing.

On October 6, Binance co-founder He Yi reiterated during a Chinese AMA at a smart product launch that "Binance's greatest challenge is talent. Although not everyone will be hired, and some may not pass the interview, we are indeed eager for talent."

This statement is not new. In December 2025, He Yi gave almost the same answer upon becoming Co-CEO: the biggest challenge Binance faces is still "talent density," requiring individuals who understand financial products, are knowledgeable in crypto, and believe in this industry. Ten months later, the same issue remains at the forefront of a top global crypto company's concerns.

This is hard to interpret merely as a recruitment problem for one company; instead, it resembles a structural hemorrhage affecting the entire industry.

1. What Binance Lacks Isn’t People, But "Talent Density"

Talent density has never been about the number of employees. A company can have thousands of staff yet still miss the truly capable individuals who can define products and solve complex problems. Particularly in an industry like Crypto, the scarcity lies not in "people who can write code," but in those who can determine "what to do next" when rules are still forming and needs are unvalidated. He Yi's example is quite specific: upon meeting a good candidate, the first reaction is to ask, "Do you want to move to the UAE?" The response is likely, "What do you want me to do in the desert?" — Even if compensation can cover market rates, geographic location and industry stigma are additional hurdles.

This is precisely what makes Binance's expansion worth observing: its strongest competitive edge has always focused on centralized trading, matching, liquidity, user distribution, and risk control, and these capabilities can continuously integrate new assets into existing pipelines.

Tokenized stocks are a typical example — bStocks launched in June 2026, with AUM growing from $5.6 million on its first day to over $500 million by the end of July; as of July, 41.5% of bStocks users had never before used Binance's stock or related derivatives, while 58.5% of early users simultaneously used Perps or direct stock products. Much of this growth is built upon Binance's existing account system, user base, stablecoin balances, and trading infrastructure.

When products are built on capabilities at which Binance excels, scale advantages can quickly translate into growth advantages; however, when business ventures enter domains like chains, wallets, DEXs, or AI that require a redefinition of product forms, existing scale cannot automatically be converted into product advantages.

Wallets are the most direct example. By the end of 2024, He Yi publicly acknowledged that Binance wallets "did not perform particularly well" over the past year and decided to rebuild from the ground up; in 2025, she again admitted that Binance wallets still lag behind industry leaders. Binance is not short on resources — hundreds of millions of users, traffic gateways, and wallets could easily be integrated into the App, but the core of a CEX lies in matching, liquidity, risk control, and scalable operations, while the core of a wallet requires self-custody experience, on-chain interaction, and developer ecosystems; the former excels at maximizing mature demands, while the latter requires teams to constantly discover immature demands.

Similarly, Binance's layout in the Layer 1 track has repeatedly faced setbacks, and its layout and investment in perpetual contracts and prediction markets have significantly lagged behind competitors, facing substantial strategic setbacks.

This lends a more concrete meaning to He Yi's repeated emphasis on "talent density."

2. AI Is Repricing Talent

Why is it increasingly difficult to recruit talent? Because one of the biggest competitors Crypto currently faces has turned into AI.

Tiger Research's statistics on the crypto industry's hiring data for the first half of 2026 show that jobs requiring AI skills rose from 23% in early 2025 to 53.1% by March 2026; PwC's AI Jobs Barometer shows that workers with AI skills earn 56% more on average than their peers; CryptoJobsList's data indicates that the average annual salary for mid-level AI-related positions is $115,000, compared to $95,000 for non-AI roles, a 21.1% premium. In just 2025, global corporate investment in AI reached about $581.7 billion, and private investment in generative AI surged over 200% — AI is no longer an unvalidated trend but is becoming the new infrastructure of the entire tech industry.

This alters the career choices of top talent. In the past, Crypto could compensate industry risks with high salaries, tokens, and entrepreneurial opportunities; today, AI offers substantial wealth potential with a stronger industry narrative and social prestige. For a young engineer, the question becomes: if it's about entrepreneurship, why create a new DeFi protocol instead of developing AI Agents? Choosing AI is not just because the salary might be higher, but because it could birth the next Google or OpenAI; even in failure, that experience becomes an asset for the next job. Meanwhile, Crypto needs to answer another question: "Why should you bet your next five years here?"

This shift has already occurred among established professionals. The founding team of CoreWeave started with Ethereum mining and pivoted to AI computing after shutting down mining in 2022; Circle co-founder Sean Neville established Catena Labs to bring stablecoin expertise into AI finance; Sam Blackshear, the creator of the Move language and co-founder of Mysten Labs, joined Anthropic in August 2026 after leaving the Sui ecosystem; and NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin is one of the co-authors of the Transformer paper. These individuals take away not just jobs but also expertise in protocol design, system architecture, financial products, and entrepreneurial experience.

IOSG Ventures founder Jocy Lin warned back in 2025 that Crypto's focus on short-term memes and speculation was driving core developers toward AI; more critically, once these individuals achieve success in AI, the probability of them returning to Crypto will greatly diminish. What AI steals isn't Crypto's labor force but the next generation of advanced talent. This even creates a one-way flow: those nurtured by Crypto are helping AI solve its next phase problems while AI rarely reciprocates by sending equally scaled new advanced talent back to Crypto.

3. What is Really Lost Is Not Developers, but Innovators

Data from Electric Capital reveals a subtler shift. The number of active developers in Crypto dropped from a peak of about 45,000 in 2022 to around 23,000, but the loss predominantly affects newcomers: the turnover rate for developers with less than a year of experience is as high as 52%, while the number of established developers with over two years of experience has actually hit a new high and now contributes about 70% of the code. Veterans remain, but newcomers are becoming increasingly scarce, and new advanced talent is concentrating towards AI and a few mature ecosystems — Bitcoin developers grew 64.3% over two years, Solana 11.1%, while Cosmos and Polkadot fell by 51.1% and 46.9%, respectively, indicating a tendency for talent to shift from narrative-dependent ecosystems to those with real users and revenue.

The job market is also shrinking in sync, with the contraction pointing in the same direction. Dragonfly's 2026 talent report shows that 3,700 new jobs were added in the crypto industry in 2025, but about 4,100 were eliminated, resulting in a net decrease of 472 positions for the year; companies are no longer pursuing broad-based expansion typical of bull markets but are focusing increasingly on truly impactful roles — compliance roles have increased by 340%, data science by 74%, while marketing, design, and customer service have significantly contracted, with application volumes dropping by about 26% in the second half of the year.

In other words, companies are selective, and individuals are also selective about companies. In the past, a hot project, a high salary, or a token incentive could complete the recruitment; now, top candidates are more concerned with three questions: What problem is this company trying to solve? What can I do after I join? Will it still exist three years from now? Dragonfly's hiring observations also found that the main factor influencing candidates to abandon opportunities is not salary, company size, or funding stage, but the "uncertainty" of the job and the company — if a company cannot clearly explain why this job is important and viable, the talent conversion rate will significantly drop.

This is particularly dangerous for the industry. In the past few market cycles, bear markets would eliminate many professionals, but new entrepreneurs would bring products like Uniswap, Aave, and Hyperliquid in the next cycle; this cycle differs in the sense that departed newcomers may not merely be exiting temporarily; they may directly enter AI, completing their entrepreneurship, capital accumulation, and social prestige in another industry.

The question then becomes: when the next cycle arrives, who will create the next generation of Crypto products? If the industry can only rely on existing projects to iterate, lacking new entrepreneurs and technological paradigms, Crypto will transform from an industry that continuously creates new categories into one competing for existing users and traffic.

This is also a layer of the talent issue that is easily underestimated: a lack of ordinary employees can be addressed with higher wages, a shortage of skilled engineers can be supplemented through recruitment, outsourcing, or AI tools; but the absence of individuals who can pose new questions, establish new products, and redefine user needs is challenging for capital to fill. Innovation requires not more people, but the judgment of a few individuals able to continually break through existing paths.

4. The Decline of Talent Density Will Ultimately Lead to Path Dependence

The talent issue will ultimately reflect on products. Hyperliquid is an extreme positive case: it established a perpetual contract market capable of competing with large trading platforms with a core team of just a dozen people — monthly transactions once exceeded $180 billion in 2025, with annual fee income around $961 million. This shows that in a complex, fast-changing industry like Crypto, team size is not the most critical metric; rather, it is the product complexity and organizational efficiency that each unit of talent can create.

Looking at Binance, it represents another path. This is not to say Binance "cannot create on-chain products." More worth discussing is that an organization centered on CEX, upon entering the on-chain world, requires a different talent structure that contrasts with its original advantages: centralized exchanges pursue stable systems, mature risk control, and predictable business outcomes; on-chain products require teams to embrace greater uncertainty in the early stages, understand the real behaviors of developers, communities, and traders, and be willing to experiment for extended periods.

When a company achieves great success through centralized trading, liquidity, and global distribution, its easiest move is to replicate those advantages into new businesses — it will draw traffic where possible, rely on scale when that solves user issues, and seldom reinvent from the ground up. Tokenized stocks perfectly fit into this capability structure; therefore, Binance quickly found a growth path, with Binance Research attributing it to "distribution channels replacing issuance as the growth engine."

However, the truly difficult issues — fostering new trading habits on-chain, redesigning wallet experiences, and establishing the next generation of trading mechanisms — require another kind of talent density.

The industry is not without responses. On the supply side, Binance has launched the Pioneer Talent Program and Accelerator Program aimed at young talents; on the demand side, another pricing logic is emerging.

Morpho CEO Paul Frambot remarked on acquisitions that over the past six months, the team received numerous opportunities to acquire crypto companies, but Morpho "rarely acquires companies for intellectual property or technology," preferring to hire suitable talent to develop end-to-end solutions independently. He defined a valuation principle for such acquisitions: "Valuation will be purely based on comparing the cost of the talent obtained with hiring a similar team." — treating "talent acquisition" as a substitute for recruitment rather than a strategic transaction to dream about.

Both point to the same matter: what is truly scarce is no longer code, but those who can determine where the code should be written. Whether these efforts will be effective depends on a more fundamental change: whether Crypto can regain its status as an industry worth investing a decade of one's career into.

Otherwise, the industry may enter a less optimistic cycle: decreasing advanced talent → fewer new products → slowing user growth → decreasing industry attractiveness → even fewer advanced talents willing to enter. Jocy Lin's concern about a "negative cycle" essentially encapsulates this process, while data from the user side is already validating the latter half — as of August 2026, the number of monthly active on-chain addresses globally dropped by 18% year-on-year, while passive holders rose by 16%; users are still there, but they are no longer active.

In the past, Crypto competed for talent with the internet and finance; now, it must vie for the most capable, ambitious individuals in the entire tech industry who believe they can change the world. This is no longer a matter of "is the salary high enough."

Because money can only compensate for risk but cannot create meaning.

A truly exceptional talent is often willing to join an industry not because the salary is 20% higher, but because they believe there are still significant problems to solve, fresh opportunities, and worthwhile endeavors deserving a few years of commitment.

This may be the most lacking element in Crypto today. Money is already ample, but the number of people willing to use that money to create the next generation of Crypto is dwindling.

The real crisis in an industry is never a lack of money or users, but rather an increasing scarcity of exceptional talent who believe they can still create the future here.