Cryptocurrency exchanges in India on hiring frenzy as user base grows

Indian Cryptocurrency exchanges are in a hiring frenzy. They are willing to double salaries and Employee Stock Option Plans for high-end talent from marquee companies and executives from these companies are willing to come onboard after witnessing a doubling of registrations and a 200% rise in volumes in Indian exchanges.

Coinbase has hired a former Google Pay executive to lead its India operations. While other crypto exchange companies are aggressively hiring across teams with a special focus on public policy, tech developers and marketing talent.

CoinDCX has doubled its workforce from 65 in September 2020 to 120 in March 2021 and WazirX has expanded its team from 35 in December to 110 as of April 2021. Its CEO Nischal Shetty says “We do not mind paying 30%-80% or even 100% higher to acquire exclusive and quality talent. However, it will depend and differ from role to role. And the need of the hour is efficient software developers who will simplify the buying and selling process on our platform for our rapidly increasing user base.”

WazirX said its volume of transactions has gone up as high as $280 million per day earlier this month and continued to grow and touch an all-time high of $370 million per day in the last week.

Shetty added with a growing user base the expectation from customers has also changed. Earlier, a user could download their consolidated trade details as an excel. However, we want to add a new feature where they can open it inside the app itself.

With an aggressively growing user base, these cryptocurrency exchanges are on the lookout to strengthen their support team and public policy team.

CoinDCX’s head of Human Resource Mudita Chauhan said “We are hiring extensively and hire 15 members on an average every month across teams. Hiring happens significantly on the technological front, as we are trying to upgrade our product offerings, besides marketing and communications. We are also hiring on the growth team which builds new use cases and products.” By end of the calendar year 2021, CoinDCX targets to reach a workforce of over 200 employees.

These companies are also looking at strategic hiring at the senior level to strengthen their core top-level team. Chauhan said, “Recently, we have onboarded an exclusive talent who will handle the quant function, who will build the quantitative trading team.” With over 135 employees, CoinSwitch Kuber has added over 90 members to its workforce in the last six months. Its chief business officer Sharan Nair said “We are now looking at a hyper-growth stage, where we are adding new members across divisions like for tech, support, finance. We are also looking at hiring exclusive talents at the vice president level, and the recent rounds of fundraising will aid scaling up.”