Cryptocurrency a hot ticket for college students
UC Berkeley students clutching portfolios with printed resumes swarmed booths of some 40 companies seeking software engineers to work in blockchain, the decentralized digital ledger that has triggered a worldwide gold rush.
Amid students in hoodies and backpacks and staid company representatives at Wednesday’s Blockchain Career Fair, Brenna Sparks stood out. The self-described porn star, who wore hot pants and a diaphanous tank top, sees herself as an ideal entrepreneurial user for cryptocurrency, the monetary systems enabled by blockchain. Paypal, Google Wallet and traditional financial institutions refuse to process payments for adult entertainment; the few that will do so take commissions as high as 40 percent, she said.
“Blockchain is the future,” said Sparks, who has a video channel on adult site SpankChain, which uses virtual currency for payments. “I get all of my cut when I sell content or when people want to send money to me. As an adult performer, SpankChain is an awesome platform.”
SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani said he left a job as a payment expert at ConsenSys, a 470-person blockchain startup, to co-found the Venice Beach (Los Angeles County) company, seeing blockchain as a natural fit
for X-rated material. Besides hosting its own live-stream video channels where viewers give virtual tips to performers, SpankChain wants to provide blockchain payment processing for other adult-entertainment sites using ethereum virtual currency.
“It’s a killer app for adult content to have a place to securely store money where it won’t be seized” by authorities, he said.
With 30 employees and $6.5 million it raised by selling its own digital tokens in an initial coin offering, SpankChain is seeking to expand; hence, its presence at the job fair.
“It’s hard finding people to work in blockchain,” Soleimani said. “And it’s hard finding people to work in porn.”
Porn aside, many companies at the job fair agreed that it is, indeed, hard to find people to work in the nascent field of blockchain, which has seen an explosion of interest in recent months — one of several since bitcoin was released in January 2009. Besides underlying cryptocurrencies, blockchain is catching on in such disparate fields as banking, health care, poker, energy, supply chain, real estate and education.
Corporate titans including JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, IBM, Microsoft, Citigroup and Nasdaq have poured billions into building blockchain frameworks.
In December, Computerworld ranked knowledge of blockchain as the second-fastestgrowing job skill and bitcoin cryptocurrency development the thirdfastest. (Robotics was No. 1.) Blockchain developers in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston command a median $158,000 annual salary, about $18,000 more than general software developers, it said. Nationwide, blockchain developers make a median $130,000, compared with $105,000 for general software developers.
At the job fair, Shiva Kintali, a former Princeton lecturer who started San Jose’s TrueShelf as a hobby, walked the floor to buttonhole attendees and ask whether they might want to work at his startup, which provides blockchain digital certificates and an adaptive learning platform. Although several hundred students packed the fair, he said many would not be qualified.
“There’s a huge scarcity of people to work in blockchain,” he said. “It helps if they have an undergraduate computer science degree. But the ratio of blockchain jobs to suitable talent is 14 to 1.”
Matthew Rosendin, who’s about to get his master’s degree in engineering, has already started a blockchain company called Polyledger. It helps investors create diversified portfolios in cryptocurrency and is in UC Berkeley’s Launch accelerator program. He came to the fair to network — and in case he needs to find a day job.
“There are a lot of amazing companies here,” he said. “They are a lot further along on their product road maps than the public realizes. They’re making realworld blockchain applications come to fruition.”
The blockchain gold rush arose so quickly that UC Berkeley has just one class dedicated to the technology, a graduatelevel course for business, engineering and law students that started this semester. But that hasn’t stopped enthusiastic students.
Rustie Lin, a sophomore computer science major, is involved in the 90-person Blockchain at Berkeley club, and teaches Blockchain Fundamentals in a DeCal course, the university’s name for student-run classes that qualify for academic credit.
“We had 800 applicants for 200 slots,” he said. “Now we’re creating an online course so everyone can take it.”
“When I joined the club, blockchain was still a niche,” he said. “Then over the past couple of months, it blew up. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it.”