The Crypto Industry Is Expanding

The growing industry faces talent shortage, study shows

2nd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study reveals new findings for 2018. Based on latest study conducted by The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Cambridge Judge Business School, new insights gathered from survey data from 180 cryptoasset companies, covering 47 countries across five world regions have been analyzed. Source: University of Cambridge

The key segments of the crypto industry include:

Mining - Hardware manufacturers, pool operators, proprietary mining as well as cloud mining services
Storage - Mobile, web, desktop, vault and hardware wallets
Payments - Merchant services, remittances, cross-border payments, micropayments
Exchange - Brokerage, OTC trading, order book exchanges

Credit: pixabay - keshavnaidu

Service providers are increasingly in two or more segments of the crypto industry - with a markedly increase from 31% to 57% of the service providers involved in multi-segment operations.

In terms of employment, the total industry headcount has grown by 164% in 2017, particularly in the storage and exchange segments. Firms in the study continue to grow by 54% (Q1 FTE growth), despite the global market crash during Q1 2018. This has resulted in a talent shortage in the industry in early 2018.

The industry is currently driven by companies based in North America, China, India and Western Europe. Majority of the headquartered entities are situated in countries such as the USA, China, Japan, India, Canada, and the UK. Emerging headquarters are situated in Russia, Brazil, Australia and South Korea.

While service support remains the highest for Bitcoin wallets, multi coin support has nearly doubled from 47% to 84% in 2018. The rise of ERC-20 tokens and ICOs listings on the exchanges may have spurred for the increase support for multi coins.

Credit: pixabay - Erdenebayar

A naive extrapolation would then suggest that between 2% and 9% of the population of developed countries would have owned cryptoassets as of mid-2018, a figure that would amount to between 28 and 126 million unique users.

The raw numbers do not include the population from non-developed countries, however ID-verified users are reaching an estimate with a minimum of 35 million, up from 18 million in 2017.

Do read up on the 96-page report for more information on user activity and location.

I have yet to complete reading the entire report, follow and keep watch on your feed for the latest updates about this report.