1. Industry Sheds Jobs As Cryptocurrency Values Plummet
The 2017 market boom resulted in a hiring spree at hundreds of startups developing new uses for blockchain as well as billions of dollars raised through initial coin offerings, according to The Wall Street Journal. Then the market cratered.
Bitcoin is down more than 80 percent from its December 2017 high, with the total market value of all cryptocurrency plummeting to just $111 billion, down 87 percent from its early January 2018 high of $827 billion, The Wall Street Journal found.
Nearly 86 percent of all initial coin offerings from 2017 are trading below their listing price, according to Ernst & Young, while 30 percent have lost almost all of their value. And the number of searches on Indeed.com for jobs related to blockchain or cryptocurrency fell 3 percent in the 12 months ended October 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported. A year earlier, searches had increased by 482 percent.
