Articles From the Team

The bold new legal frontier: cryptocurrency/digital assets

As part of my role as an in-house legal recruiter, I’m tasked to forecast legal recruitment trends. And as part of my life as a perennial explorer of technological advancement, I’m addicted to learning what’s on the horizon. I’ll also confess that I’m an everyday user of technology; just about anywhere and everywhere I can lay my hands on it. This includes cryptocurrency and digital assets with genuine use cases (emphasis on the ‘genuine’). So luckily right now, I’ve found a way to blend my job and my life.

The last 12 months

From 2017, where there were infrequent opportunities for appropriately skilled lawyers looking to move into this bold new frontier, to now, where there’s been a boom of fantastic jobs at fantastic employers; a majority of them are with exchanges (see: places where you can swap your depreciating Fiat) for a multitude of technology linked hope rockets.

Lawyers learning new skills

Not only that, but I’m seeing an up-welling of lawyers who’ve taken the time to learn about the skills required to service these businesses.  This is a trend that’s very much with the zeitgeist: the total market capitalisation one year ago, at time of writing, was $60 billion; today it stands at $382 billion peaking at $828 billion in early Jan 18. To put that into perspective – the dotcom boom topped out at $3 trillion in the year 2000 (obviously we know the technology stock market has gone much higher as the crash survivors partied on) – so how much is $3 trillion in today’s depreciating Fiat? The trend is bullish with some commentators putting a possibility of $40 trillion on the market.

What happens next?

If you picked the ‘Amazon’ of the crypto world today, you could lend your bank balance a healthy boost over the next decade, but if you’re a lawyer, why not hedge your bets and work the angle from the inside? A new sector has formed in the technology world and it’s here to stay; even more so when the market becomes regulated by governments. Once financial institutions – who’ve previously been prevented from playing an active role – are able to invest, then we’ll begin to see some amazing projects coming to the fore. It’s exciting, and whilst it’s not the ‘beginning of the end’ of the trend, it’s the end of the crypto beginning.