via fortune:
If you want a job in the crypto industry, now is not a great time to look. A new report from the Brookings Institution found that after a monster 2021 and early 2022, open positions at crypto companies in the U.S. have fallen in droves, with major cities seeing drops as high as 80%.
The crypto industry has long been defined by extreme boom-and-bust cycles, but the past few years have proven particularly dramatic, with Bitcoin rising to nearly $70,000 in November 2021 before the sector saw a calamitous decline thanks to the collapse of high-profile projects like FTX and ensuing enforcement actions from government agencies.
During the boom, crypto advocates portrayed the digital asset industry as an area for economic growth and opportunity. Local leaders from Texas to Florida sought to capitalize on the hype, with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez even launching his own ill-fated crypto token in an effort to portray the city as friendly to the industry.
The Brookings report—authored by Tonantzin Carmona, Mark Muro, and Sifan Liu—illustrates the dangers of the sector’s volatility on job growth. Analyzing data from Crunchbase, the researchers found that the number of new startups emerging in the crypto space has fallen from a peak of 80 per month in January 2022 to just two in April 2023.