Somewhere between 2021 and 2023, much of the Web3 industry learned, at great cost, that the same logic driving increased hiring in a bull market can work just as effectively in reverse. During the peak of these years, the sector added employees at a pace that made traditional technology seem conservative, but when token prices fell, revenue forecasts were sharply revised downward, and corrections arrived quickly.
more 26,000 cryptocurrency employees lost their jobs In 2022 alone, with Coinbase and Kraken cutting 20% and 30% of their workforces, respectively. In fact, according to some estimates, the cryptocurrency sector has declined almost as a whole 40 percent of its total workforce between 2022 and 2024, leading many to believe that the regulatory model used by the industry was not sustainable.
However, the companies that avoided the worst of that cycle tended to share a common trait: they did not hire extensively. Infrastructure-focused companies that continued to build during the downturn, especially those working on Layer 2 performance, cryptographic tools, enterprise compliance systems, and cross-chain interoperability, were often the ones that emerged stronger. StartleSoneium, the company behind the Ethereum Layer 2 network, clearly reflects this shift, as it has continued to scale its infrastructure without adopting the massive regulatory structures that defined much of the previous crypto cycle.
The issue of depth is widespread
The concept of talent density, that is, building organizations around the exceptional ability of each person rather than the total number of employees, applies especially strongly to deep infrastructure development. In fact, the teams responsible for the most significant technical developments in the cryptocurrency space have always been small by enterprise standards.
For example, the original Ethereum team, which was behind the first practical implementations of zero-knowledge proofs, and the engineers who built the EVM architecture on which most L2 languages still depend, were operating with a fraction of the headcount that their output would suggest.
And while job postings in this sector have rebounded in recent years (47% in 2025), demand for new talent appears to have drifted toward compliance engineers, security specialists, AI-Web3 hybrid architects, and enterprise systems integrators, which are essentially specializations where the gap between a solid employee and an average employee has significant consequences for what is actually shipped.
Building what doesn’t fully exist yet
The particular challenge that Startale is working on (i.e., blockchain regulatory infrastructure at the enterprise level that also operates at the consumer level) involves technical issues without established operating rules. To this point, Soneium has recently surpassed 600 million transactions and 5.4 million active wallets since its launch during Q1 2025.
What’s more, over 250 independent developer-created apps now live on Soneium (including games, music, AI-driven content, and creativity tools) are a testament to what makes this kind of cross-disciplinary depth possible at scale. As well as the Startale Superstars incubation program, which It offers a prize pool of $250,000 Designed to attract developers who can build audiences who may never know they are interacting with the blockchain.
This interdisciplinary depth, where each specialist understands enough of adjacent disciplines to integrate their work effectively, is not something that can be approximated by adding more staff but by making informed decisions.
In sum, Web3’s broader takeaway does not appear to be overtly complex, as the companies that emerged from the 2022-2024 downturn in the strongest technical position were largely those optimized for depth rather than size. Those now building the infrastructure (poised to define the next cryptocurrency innovation cycle) are doing so with teams that are minimal by any traditional scale.
