As crypto explodes, exchanges need a variety of engineers

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The world is still divided over the survival of cryptocurrencies. But for now, the action is intense on the pitch. Including in India. Market research companies have placed Indians among the top users and holders of cryptocurrency. Several cryptocurrency exchanges that allow you to trade cryptocurrencies and even use them to purchase goods and services have sprung up in India, and most are doing phenomenal business. Coin-DCX became India’s first cryptocurrency unicorn in August when the exchange raised $ 90 million from investors. Coinswitch Kuber reached 10 million registered users in September, just 15 months after launch, making it perhaps the largest exchange in India. Building these exchanges requires a lot of software and engineering talent. Recruitment company Xpheno estimates that there are currently over 10,000 active job vacancies in the cryptocurrency segment in India. Even global trade comes to India for the talent. Coinbase, listed on Nasdaq, establishes tech facility in Hyderabad. Pankaj Gupta, vice president of engineering at Coinbases and site manager for India, blogged in July about how India is seeing a boom in crypto-native talent. He said the company is hiring front-end engineers, data and machine learning engineers, product designers and many more. These teams in India will be led by local engineering directors, who will have broad, independent and autonomous charters. They are intentionally put in place for local decision making to maximize impact and speed, he wrote. Exchanges need talent to create, maintain, and improve multiple components. They need UI designers and front-end engineers to create a visually appealing application that is also simple and transparent to use, especially since users are new to cryptography. They need engineers to create a trading engine that can quickly match buyers and sellers and enable immediate trades. They need to provide people with a variety of ways to use their cryptocurrency not only as an investment, but also for, say, payments (Unocoin allows users to top up their Fastag, make bill payments). This requires the construction of these interconnections. They need to activate the wallets for users to keep their cryptocurrency. They must offer extremely high levels of security. The whole transaction system is usually built on a blockchain network, and while this offers a lot of trust and security, the blockchains have been hacked. Exchange Responsibilities Avinash Shekhar, co-CEO of Zeb-Pay, says talent around crypto deposit infrastructure is proving to be a key requirement. Exchanges have three responsibilities. First, if you are depositing Bitcoin from somewhere, we should have an automated system that takes that into account. The transaction usually occurs on the blockchain infrastructure. Second, because exchanges can be hacked, you need an infrastructure to keep them secure. Third, when you make a withdrawal request, it must again be processed in an automated manner using a sufficiently secure blockchain infrastructure. Cryptographic engineers need to understand every block in the chain and how data moves. There is a great demand for a blockchain engineer with an understanding of blockchain security, platforms, architecture and standards, he said. Ashish Singhal, founder of Coinswitch Kuber, says they are looking for skills in problem solving, product development, data, engineering and security. The blockchain industry, he says, is giving security a new face, but the talent of blockchain security has not evolved in India. We had to travel to Israel and the United States for security experts, he said. Another rapidly evolving field is that of smart contracts, built on the Ethereum blockchain network. They are collections of code that execute a set of statements when certain predefined conditions are met. These contracts, which make it impossible to falsify transactions, power decentralized applications. Ethereum is also what enabled the rise of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are digital assets designed to represent the ownership of unique virtual objects. Sathvik Vishwanath, CEO and Co-Founder of Unocoin, says smart contracts allow users to create decentralized funding protocols, create NFTs, create self-executing escrow contracts. Nischal Shetty, founder of WazirX, says smart contracts have created good demand for developers specializing in Solidity, the preferred programming language for smart contracts. He says developers familiar with Python will find it easy to learn Solidity because they have a similar syntax. Almost all companies in the sector are expanding. ZebPay’s head of human resources, Geetika Mehta, said she plans to increase the workforce from 220 of which 30% will be engineers to 400-450 in 6-9 months. WazirX had 35 employees in January; it is now 300. Coinswitch Kubers Singhal said they had grown to 350, from 20 last year, and that they expect to be a team of 1,500 by the end of the 2021-2022 fiscal year. A third of the talent will be engineers, specializing in data, security and solving complex engineering problems, he says.

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