Crypto and Web3 Terms

78 words you will meet in a crypto job advert, in plain English.

78 termscounted across 4,212 job advertsupdated 23 Sep 2026

78 terms

Most common in job adverts

Web326%
wallet15%
DeFi15%
Custody9%
governance8%
stablecoin8%
Bridge7%
AML6%
smart contract6%
staking5%

The basics

What a blockchain is and the words underneath everything else.

Web3web 3.0: A name for internet services built on public blockchains, where accounts, money and records are handled by software that no single company runs. The label is contested: there is no agreed test for whether a product qualifies, and many people use it simply as a synonym for the crypto industry.On a job advert it usually tells you the employer is a crypto company rather than anything about the role, which may be ordinary marketing, compliance, finance or support work.In 1,115 of 4,212 adverts
blockchain: A shared record of transactions, copied across many independent computers, where new entries are added in batches and old entries are never edited or deleted. Because every copy has to agree, no single participant can quietly rewrite what happened.A blockchain is only the record-keeping underneath; the coins, tokens and apps people talk about are built on top of one.
smart contract: A program stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when someone sends it a transaction, and whose code and results anyone can inspect. It is neither smart nor a contract in the legal sense: it does exactly what its code says, including when the code is wrong.Most crypto products are a smart contract plus a website that talks to it, so "smart contract audit" or "smart contract risk" on an advert means checking that code for mistakes someone could exploit.In 246 of 4,212 adverts
dappdecentralized application, dApp: An application whose core logic runs on a blockchain instead of on a company's servers. The part users see is usually a normal website or phone app; it is the handling of balances and rules that sits on the blockchain.In adverts it generally means the customer-facing product a company builds, such as a trading app, a game or a lending site, as opposed to the blockchain underneath.
wallet: An app or small physical device that stores the secret keys used to approve blockchain transactions, and shows you what those keys control. A wallet does not hold your coins: the balances sit on the blockchain, and the wallet holds the key that moves them.On an advert "wallet" can mean a product the company builds, or just the thing a user connects in order to sign in, since many crypto sites use a wallet in place of an email and password.In 638 of 4,212 adverts
self-custodynon-custodial: An arrangement where the user holds the keys to their own crypto, so no company can move it or freeze it, and no one can restore it if the user loses the keys. The opposite is custodial, where a business holds the keys on the customer's behalf, as an exchange does.The distinction shapes hiring: custodial businesses hold customer money and need compliance, finance and support staff, while a self-custody product never touches it.In 142 of 4,212 adverts
seed phraserecovery phrase, mnemonic: A list of ordinary words, usually 12 or 24, that a wallet produces when it is first set up and that can rebuild every key in that wallet on any device. Anyone who reads it can take everything in the wallet, and nobody can reset it if it is lost.Genuine support staff never ask for one, so any message requesting a seed phrase is a scam.
private key: The secret number that proves ownership of a blockchain account and authorizes anything leaving it. It pairs with a public address, which is safe to give out: the address is where people send things, the private key is what spends them."Key management" on an advert means the procedures, hardware and approvals a company uses to keep these secrets from being stolen or lost.
gas: The fee paid to get a transaction processed on Ethereum and on the chains that copy its design, priced by how much computing work the transaction takes rather than how much money it moves. It is paid in the network's own coin, rises when the network is busy, and is charged whether the transaction succeeds or fails."Gas optimization" means rewriting code so that each transaction costs users less.In 9 of 4,212 adverts
EVMEthereum Virtual Machine: The software environment that runs smart contract code on Ethereum, and a standard that many other blockchains have adopted so contracts built for one will run on another. A chain described as "EVM-compatible" executes the same compiled code, usually written in Solidity.On an advert "EVM" is shorthand for that whole family of chains, and a role asking for EVM experience wants Solidity rather than the Rust used on Solana.In 140 of 4,212 adverts
on-chain and off-chain: On-chain means anything recorded on the blockchain itself, where it is public, permanent and costs a fee to write. Off-chain means everything kept outside it: a company's own database, its customer records, a chat, a signed document.The phrase turns up well outside engineering, because "on-chain data" is what analysts, marketers and compliance teams can examine themselves without asking the company for it.
mainnet and testnet: Mainnet is the live blockchain, where balances are real and mistakes cost real money. A testnet is a parallel copy used for trying things out, where the coins are worthless and can be requested for free; work is built and tested there, then released to mainnet.Some networks run more than one test copy: on Solana, application developers are told to use the one called devnet, while its testnet is for people running the network's own software.
node: A computer running a blockchain's software, holding a copy of the record and passing new transactions on to the others. A network is simply a large number of these, run by unrelated people and companies, which is what stops any one of them changing the rules alone.Most companies pay for access to someone else's nodes instead of running their own, which is what an advert means by node infrastructure or an RPC provider.
consensus: The process by which the computers running a blockchain agree on which transactions happened and in what order, without trusting one another or any central authority. Networks use different rules for it: Bitcoin's requires spending electricity, Ethereum's requires putting up a deposit that can be destroyed for misbehavior."Consensus" in a job title means engineering work on those rules, not the everyday English sense of agreement.
fork: A change to a blockchain's rules, or the split that happens when not everyone adopts the change. Most forks are scheduled upgrades that everybody accepts; occasionally a disagreement leaves two chains running side by side, which is how Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic came to be separate from the chains they came from.The word also keeps its ordinary software meaning, copying someone's open-source code to build your own version, and crypto adverts use both senses.
block explorer: A website for looking up transactions, addresses and balances on a blockchain, open to anyone without an account or permission. Every network has at least one; Etherscan, for Ethereum, is the best known.It is a standard tool for non-engineers: support uses it to see whether a customer's transfer went through, and finance and compliance use it to follow where funds moved.
EthereumETH, ether: A blockchain designed to run general-purpose programs, launched in July 2015, with a coin called ether that is used to pay its transaction fees. Since 15 September 2022 it has been secured by people locking up ether as a deposit rather than by mining, so any description of Ethereum being mined is out of date.Much of the industry's tooling was built for Ethereum first and many later chains copied its design, which is why "EVM experience" is such a common line in adverts.
BitcoinBTC: The first blockchain, launched in 2009, built to let people hold and send a currency of the same name without a bank. Its scripting is deliberately limited, so it does not run general-purpose programs the way later chains do, and it is still secured by mining, with computers competing on raw computation, which is where its energy consumption comes from.Capital-B Bitcoin usually refers to the network, lowercase bitcoin to the coin itself.
SolanaSOL: A blockchain designed for high transaction volume and low fees, with its own coin, SOL. It is not EVM-compatible: its programs are usually written in Rust rather than Solidity, so Ethereum development skills do not carry across directly.Adverts tend to name Ethereum or Solana specifically, because the two use different languages, tools and wallets.
layer 1L1, base layer: A blockchain that runs and secures itself and settles its own transactions; Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are all layer 1s. A layer 2 is a separate, faster and cheaper network that processes transactions itself but writes its results back to a layer 1, which it depends on for final settlement and security."Layer 1" on an advert usually signals that the employer builds the base network itself — protocol engineering, validators and node software — rather than an application running on top of one.

Money and markets

How crypto is traded, lent and priced.

DeFidecentralized finance: Financial services — trading, lending, borrowing, insurance — run by programs on a blockchain rather than by a company, with customers holding their own coins and dealing with the code directly.How decentralized any given service actually is varies widely: many have a company behind them, an administrator key that can change or halt the code, and a website that can be switched off, so the label covers a range rather than a fixed standard.In 626 of 4,212 adverts
DEXdecentralized exchange: A place to swap one crypto token for another that runs as code on a blockchain rather than as a company, so the trade settles directly between users' own wallets and no business holds your coins along the way.Most price trades using a shared pool and a formula (see AMM), though some use an order book in the way a conventional exchange does.In 87 of 4,212 adverts
CEXcentralized exchange: A crypto trading platform run by a company that holds customers' money and coins on their behalf and matches trades on its own internal systems.Because it holds customer assets, it carries the obligations of a financial firm — licensing, identity checks on customers, custody and reporting — so exchanges employ large compliance, support and finance teams.
AMMautomated market maker: A way of running a market without matching individual buyers to sellers: traders buy from and sell into a shared pool of tokens, and a formula sets the price from how much of each token is left in the pool.The larger a trade is relative to the pool, the worse the price it gets; the gap between the price expected and the price received is what adverts call slippage.In 42 of 4,212 adverts
liquidity providerLP: Someone who deposits tokens — usually a matched pair — into a trading pool so that other people have something to trade against, in return for a share of the fees those trades pay.If the two tokens' prices move apart, the pool returns a different mix than was put in and the provider can end up worse off than simply holding the tokens; this is called impermanent loss, though the loss is real once the money is withdrawn.
TVLtotal value locked: The dollar value of all the crypto currently deposited in a particular service, counted at that moment's prices.It is the standard way to rank DeFi services by size, but it measures deposits rather than revenue, users or profit, and it rises and falls with token prices even when nobody deposits or withdraws anything.In 41 of 4,212 adverts
stablecoinstables: A crypto token designed to hold a steady value, almost always one US dollar, normally backed by reserves of cash and short-term government debt held by the company that issues it, which promises to exchange each token for a dollar on demand. Steadiness is a design goal rather than a guarantee: coins that tried to hold their price through trading incentives instead of reserves have collapsed.Stablecoins are how most crypto trading is priced and settled, and in the US the GENIUS Act of July 2025 requires issuers of payment stablecoins to hold one dollar of cash or similarly low-risk assets for every dollar issued.In 350 of 4,212 adverts
yieldAPY, yield farming: The return someone earns for putting their crypto to work — lending it out, supplying a trading pool, or locking it up to help run a blockchain — normally quoted as an annual percentage.Advertised rates often include payments made in the service's own token, which can be cut at any time and can fall in value, so a headline yield is not comparable to a bank interest rate.
vault: A program running on a blockchain that accepts deposits and then follows a set investment strategy with them automatically, so depositors do not have to manage the positions themselves.The word has a second, unrelated sense: exchanges and custody providers also call their secured key storage a vault, so an advert mentioning vaults may mean strategy work or may mean safeguarding keys.
lending and borrowingmoney markets, lending protocols: Depositing crypto so that other people can borrow it in return for interest, or pledging crypto as collateral to take out a loan against it, through a program that sets the interest rate automatically from supply and demand.In the usual form there is no credit check and no repayment schedule: the borrower pledges more value than they take out, and if that collateral falls too far it is sold automatically to repay the loan, which is called liquidation.
perpetualperp, perpetual future, perpetual swap: A contract that lets a trader bet on an asset's price rising or falling with no expiry date, so the position can be held open indefinitely. A regular payment between the two sides, called the funding rate, keeps the contract's price close to the asset's actual market price.Perps are the most heavily traded type of crypto derivative and are usually traded with borrowed money, so trading venues hire steadily for risk, market surveillance and conduct roles around them.In 92 of 4,212 adverts
order bookCLOB, central limit order book: A live list of the prices at which people are currently willing to buy and sell an asset, and how much they want at each price; a trade happens when the highest offer to buy meets the lowest offer to sell.This is how centralized exchanges and a growing number of on-chain exchanges work, as opposed to the pool-and-formula approach of an AMM.
market makerMM: A firm that continuously quotes both a price it will buy at and a price it will sell at, earning the gap between the two, so there is usually someone on the other side of a trade.Token issuers commonly pay a market-making firm to keep their token tradable after it lists on an exchange, so "market maker" in an advert can mean working at such a firm, or managing the relationship with one from the issuer's side.
spot tradingspot market, cash market: Buying or selling the asset itself, at the current price, for settlement now.The term exists mainly to distinguish it from derivatives such as perps, where the trade is in a contract based on the price rather than in the coin itself.
oracleprice feed, data oracle: A service that feeds outside information — most often an asset's current price — onto a blockchain so that programs running there can act on it.Programs on a blockchain cannot see anything outside their own network, so lending and derivatives services depend on oracles to know what collateral is worth; a delayed or manipulated feed is a recurring cause of large losses.In 67 of 4,212 adverts
MEVmaximal extractable value; formerly miner extractable value: The profit available to whoever decides which transactions go into the next batch a blockchain records, and in what order — made by inserting, reordering or leaving out transactions, for example buying just ahead of someone else's large order and selling into it.It originally stood for miner extractable value and was renamed after Ethereum stopped using mining in September 2022; teams hiring on MEV are either capturing this profit or building ways to reduce how much of it comes out of ordinary users' trades.In 27 of 4,212 adverts
intents and solversintent-based trading, solvers, fillers: A way of trading in which the user states the result they want — say, this much of one token for at least that much of another — rather than the steps to get there, and competing specialists work out how to deliver it. The stated result is the intent; the specialists competing to fulfill it are solvers.The user approves the outcome instead of each individual transaction, which moves the work of finding a good price and route onto the solver.
prediction marketevent contracts, information markets: A market where people trade contracts that pay a fixed amount if a stated event happens and nothing if it does not, so a contract's price can be read as the odds the market is giving that event.In the US these operate as derivatives exchanges overseen by the CFTC rather than as betting sites, though whether some markets amount to gambling remains disputed.In 188 of 4,212 adverts
real-world assetsRWA, tokenization, tokenized assets: Traditional assets — government bonds, money-market funds, private credit, property, commodities — recorded as tokens on a blockchain so that they can be held, transferred and settled like crypto. The token is a claim on something that exists off the blockchain, so its value depends on the issuer and custodian standing behind it, not on the code alone.Adverts in this area usually ask for custody, fund administration or securities experience alongside familiarity with tokens.In 129 of 4,212 adverts

Tokens, pay and governance

What a token is, how it is given out, and what a token grant means for your salary.

tokencrypto token: A unit of value recorded on a blockchain and transferable between accounts, with ownership tracked by that shared record rather than by a bank or a company. A token can stand for a currency, a claim on revenue, a vote, or access to a product, so the word describes how something is recorded, not what it is worth or what rights come with it.In a job advert it usually means the company's own token — the one it issued, may pay part of your compensation in, and will expect you to market, support or account for.
tokenomicstoken economics, token design: The design of a token's supply and distribution: how many exist, who received them, how new ones are created or destroyed, and what holders can do with them.A role asking for tokenomics experience generally wants someone who can model those numbers and explain them — what share goes to the team, investors and users, on what schedule, and what that does to each group's incentives.In 51 of 4,212 adverts
vesting and cliffvesting schedule, lockup: Vesting is the schedule on which pay promised in tokens or shares gradually becomes yours; a cliff is an initial waiting period during which none of it does, with the first portion arriving in one piece at the end of it.The mechanism is the same one used for startup equity: on a four-year schedule with a one-year cliff, leaving in month eleven means you receive nothing. With tokens there are two dates to ask about separately — when they vest, meaning they are yours, and when they unlock, meaning you are allowed to sell them.In 15 of 4,212 adverts
token granttoken award, token compensation: A promise of a set number of a company's tokens as part of your pay, handed over gradually rather than all at once.It is the token counterpart of a stock option grant. Worth establishing before you accept: whether the token exists yet, whether there is anywhere to sell it, what happens to the grant if no token ever launches, and whether a lockup applies after it vests.
airdrop: A free distribution of a project's tokens to a large number of accounts at once, usually chosen because they already used the product or held something the project wanted to reward.Projects use them to put ownership in the hands of existing users and to draw attention at launch. The word is also a standard phishing lure: an unexpected offer of free tokens leading to a site that asks you to connect a wallet and approve a transaction that empties it.In 6 of 4,212 adverts
points programpoints, airdrop points: A running score a project keeps of how much you have used it, usually tracked on the project's own servers rather than on a blockchain, typically in the months before it launches a token.Points are not tokens and carry no guaranteed value: the project decides whether they ever convert into anything and at what rate, and can change the rules while the program is running. Building and running one is a common task in early-stage marketing and community roles.
NFTnon-fungible token: A blockchain record that refers to one specific item rather than to a quantity of interchangeable units, so each one is individually identifiable and has a single owner at a time.Two common misunderstandings: the image or file itself usually is not stored on the blockchain — the record holds a link to it — and buying one does not by itself transfer copyright in the underlying work. The same mechanism is used well beyond art, for event tickets, domain names and membership passes.In 84 of 4,212 adverts
DAOdecentralized autonomous organization: A group that makes decisions by having its members vote on proposals, with the voting and the group's funds handled by code on a blockchain rather than by a board or a management team.How autonomous any particular one is gets disputed, since most still depend on a core team for day-to-day work. The legal position is unsettled: some register under state laws written for them, such as Wyoming's, while a US court in 2023 treated an unregistered one as an unincorporated association whose voting members could be personally liable.In 46 of 4,212 adverts
governanceon-chain governance, token governance: The process by which decisions about a project are made, and the question of who gets to make them — what changes to the software, how the money is spent, who is appointed.In crypto this often means holders of a project's token voting on proposals that then take effect automatically. But the word also keeps its ordinary business meaning, and in compliance, risk and finance adverts it usually refers to internal controls and reporting lines rather than token voting — read the rest of the advert to tell which is meant.In 358 of 4,212 adverts
treasuryprotocol treasury, DAO treasury: The pool of money and tokens a project holds to fund its own operations — salaries, grants, marketing, reserves — often kept in wallets that require several people to approve a payment.Treasury roles range from ordinary corporate finance to managing holdings whose value moves daily. Where the treasury belongs to a DAO, spending may be authorized by a member vote rather than by a finance team, which changes what the job involves.
staking: Locking up an amount of a network's own currency as a deposit in exchange for a share of what the network pays out for helping to run it, with part of that deposit at risk if the rules are broken.Ethereum has worked this way since September 2022, when it stopped being mined; a validator there needs at least 32 ETH. Companies also use the word loosely for products that simply pay a return on a deposit they hold for you, which is a different arrangement carrying different risks.In 227 of 4,212 adverts
liquid stakingliquid staking derivative, LSD, LST: A service that takes your deposit into a network, does the technical work of running it on your behalf, and issues you a tradeable receipt for what you are owed, so the deposit keeps earning while the receipt can be sold or used elsewhere.That receipt is itself a token with its own market price, which can drift away from the value of the deposit standing behind it.In 20 of 4,212 adverts
restaking: Committing a deposit that already secures one blockchain as collateral for further services at the same time, in return for extra rewards from them.The same money now backs several promises at once, so a failure against any one of them can cost you the deposit, and each additional service sets its own rules for when that happens.In 7 of 4,212 adverts
validatornode operator: A computer, together with the deposit standing behind it, that checks and confirms transactions for a blockchain and is paid for doing so honestly and reliably.Running one is infrastructure work — uptime, monitoring, key management — rather than trading. On Ethereum each one needs at least 32 ETH staked before it can start.In 38 of 4,212 adverts
slashing: A penalty that destroys part of the deposit put up by someone helping to run a blockchain, applied automatically when the software can prove they broke the network's rules.On Ethereum it is reserved for provable misbehavior, such as signing two conflicting blocks for the same slot; being offline is not slashing and in normal conditions costs only missed rewards. The loss also grows with how much stake is slashed around the same time, so a widespread failure is punished far harder than an isolated one.
ERC-20EIP-20: The shared rulebook that interchangeable tokens on Ethereum follow — how to report a balance, how to send an amount, how to let another party spend on your behalf — so that wallets and exchanges can handle any of them without being built for each one separately."Interchangeable" is the key word: one unit is identical to every other, as with currency. In an advert it normally just signals that the role touches Ethereum-based tokens.
ERC-721EIP-721: The equivalent rulebook on Ethereum for records that each refer to one distinct item, giving every one its own identifier instead of treating them as a quantity of identical units.It is the standard most NFTs are built on, which is why the two terms often appear beside each other in the same advert.

Words in the job advert

Compliance, security and engineering terms that show up in the requirements.

Layer 2L2: A separate blockchain that runs on top of a main one, handling transactions cheaply and quickly and then posting a record of them back down for the main chain to settle for good. Its security comes from the chain underneath rather than from a network of its own.Much of the day-to-day activity on Ethereum has moved to these chains — Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, zkSync and others — so an advert naming one usually means the team builds on that chain rather than on Ethereum directly.In 130 of 4,212 adverts
Rollupoptimistic rollup, ZK rollup, validity rollup: The most common kind of layer 2: it bundles many transactions together, processes them away from the main chain, and posts a compressed record back to it. The two designs differ in how that record is proved honest — optimistic rollups publish it and allow a set period in which anyone can challenge it, while validity or ZK rollups publish a mathematical proof of correctness up front.Nearly every major Ethereum layer 2 is a rollup, so "rollup engineer" means working on the software that runs one of these chains.In 61 of 4,212 adverts
Zero-knowledgeZK, zk-SNARK, zk-STARK, validity proof: A method of proving a statement is true without revealing the information behind it — proving you are over 18, for example, without showing your date of birth. In crypto job adverts it more often means using those proofs for compression than for secrecy: a short proof that a large batch of work was done correctly, which a chain can check quickly without redoing the work.Do not assume a product labeled "ZK" is private — many hide nothing at all and use the mathematics purely for speed.In 58 of 4,212 adverts
Bridgecross-chain bridge, wrapped asset: A service that moves value from one blockchain to another, normally by locking or destroying the coin on the first chain and issuing a matching one on the second. Nothing actually crosses between the chains: what you hold afterwards is a new token on the destination chain standing in for the original.Bridges hold large pooled balances and have been the target of some of the industry's biggest thefts, so "bridge security" or "bridge monitoring" in an advert is usually a security, risk or engineering role rather than a product one.In 293 of 4,212 adverts
Sequencershared sequencer, decentralized sequencer: The software, and the company running it, that decides the order in which a layer 2's transactions are processed and packages them for posting to the main chain. On every major layer 2 it is still run by a single operator, so the chain can stall if that operator goes down — though users can usually force a transaction through via the main chain instead.Spreading the role across several operators is live work rather than a solved problem, so an advert about decentralizing the sequencer is an infrastructure engineering role.
Data availabilityDA, DA layer: The guarantee that the underlying data behind a batch of transactions has actually been published somewhere anyone can fetch it, so outsiders can check the result and, if the operator disappears, work out who owns what. Without it a layer 2 could announce a correct-looking result that nobody is able to verify or challenge.Rollups have to choose where to publish that data — on the main chain, which is safer and costs more, or on a cheaper dedicated network — and that choice is one of the main things separating otherwise similar chains.
Smart contract auditsecurity audit, contract review: A paid review of a blockchain program's code by outside security specialists, who look for ways it could be exploited before it handles real money; the output is a report listing findings by severity and what the team fixed. It is not a certification and not a guarantee — audited code is still exploited, and the report only ever covered the code as it stood on the day."Audited by" in a company's marketing is a claim the company is making about itself; "audit" in a job title usually means you would be the one doing the reviewing.In 40 of 4,212 adverts
Formal verificationFV: Using mathematics to prove that a program always behaves the way a written specification says it should, instead of testing it against a sample of cases and assuming the rest hold. The catch is that it proves the code matches the specification: if the specification itself is wrong, the proof still stands and the system still breaks.It is slower and more expensive than an audit and is normally reserved for the small, critical parts of a system, so an advert asking for it is usually a senior engineering or research role.
KYCknow your customer, identity verification, onboarding: The legally required process of establishing who a customer is before letting them use a financial service — typically collecting a government ID, a photo or short video, an address and a date of birth, and checking that they hold up.At a crypto company this is often a hands-on operations job: reviewing the cases automated checks could not clear, and deciding whether to approve, reject or ask for more documents.In 181 of 4,212 adverts
KYBknow your business, know your customer's business: The same idea as KYC but applied to a company rather than a person: confirming the business is properly registered and genuinely trading, what it actually does, and who ultimately owns or controls it. Tracing the real people behind layers of holding companies is usually the hard part.It comes up at firms whose customers are other firms — exchanges taking on institutional clients, payment providers, custodians.
AMLanti-money laundering, financial crime, AML/CFT: The body of law, and the work a company does to obey it, aimed at stopping money from crime being moved or disguised through a financial service. It is a whole program rather than a single check: verifying customers, watching what they do afterwards, screening them against sanctions lists, and reporting anything suspicious to the authorities.It sits behind a large share of the non-engineering job titles at crypto companies, from analyst — reviewing individual cases — up to a compliance officer who is personally accountable to the regulator for the whole program.In 266 of 4,212 adverts
Transaction monitoringTM, activity monitoring, alert review: Automated screening of customer activity for patterns that suggest crime — amounts and timing that match known laundering behavior, an account suddenly being used differently, or funds arriving from addresses linked to theft or fraud. Anything that trips a rule becomes an alert, which a person then reviews and either closes or escalates.In crypto it covers both money moving through banks and funds moving on the blockchain itself, which is why blockchain analytics tools turn up in these adverts; alert review is the entry-level version of the job.In 94 of 4,212 adverts
Sanctions screeningwatchlist screening, OFAC screening: Checking customers, the people they transact with and — in crypto — wallet addresses against government lists of individuals, companies and countries a business is forbidden to deal with. Unlike most compliance work there is no room for judgment about risk appetite: a genuine match is a hard stop, and in many countries dealing with a listed party is an offense whether or not you meant to.The lists change constantly, the US Treasury's list includes crypto wallet addresses as well as names, and addresses come off it as well as on, so this is continuous work rather than a check performed once at signup.
MiCAMarkets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCAR: The European Union's single rulebook for crypto: a firm offering crypto services to EU customers must be licensed by a national regulator, one country's license covers the whole bloc, and separate rules apply to issuing tokens, stablecoins in particular. The transitional period that let existing firms keep operating without that license closed on 1 July 2026 at the latest, and earlier than that in several member states.Adverts mentioning MiCA are usually at firms working through, or just out of, that licensing process, and the roles tend to be compliance, legal or operations.In 56 of 4,212 adverts
VASPvirtual asset service provider; CASP in the EU: The regulatory label for any business that handles crypto on other people's behalf — exchanges, brokers, custodians, transfer services and some wallet providers. It comes from the Financial Action Task Force, the intergovernmental body that sets global anti-money-laundering standards, and most countries have written some version of it into their own law."Registered VASP" in an advert means the company is licensed or registered somewhere to do this; the EU's equivalent term under MiCA is CASP, so you will see both.
Travel ruleFATF Recommendation 16, crypto travel rule: The requirement that when one regulated crypto firm sends a customer's funds to another, it must also pass along identifying details of the sender and the intended recipient — the same obligation banks have had on wire transfers for decades. The amount at which it applies varies by country: the EU sets no minimum at all for transfers between licensed firms, while the long-standing US threshold is $3,000.It is awkward in crypto because the receiving address may not belong to a regulated firm at all, so compliance teams spend real time working out who, if anyone, is on the other end.In 21 of 4,212 adverts
Custodycustodian, custodial: Holding crypto on someone else's behalf, which in practice means controlling the private key — the secret code that can move the funds. A regulated custodian is responsible both for keeping those keys safe and for keeping customer assets separate from the firm's own money.Adverts use "custody" for two different things — the technology of key management and signing, and the regulated business of licensing, controls and client reporting — so check which side a role sits on before applying.In 399 of 4,212 adverts
Cold storagecold wallet, air-gapped storage; "hot wallet" is the opposite: Keeping private keys on a device that has never been connected to the internet, so an attacker who breaks into the company's systems still cannot sign a transaction. Getting funds out takes a deliberate, usually manual, offline step.Exchanges typically hold the great majority of customer assets this way and keep a smaller working balance in internet-connected hot wallets to fund day-to-day withdrawals.
Multisigmulti-signature, multisig wallet, Safe: An arrangement where moving funds needs approval from several separate keys rather than one — three of five named people, for example — so that no single person, or single laptop, can be compromised to lose everything. It does not protect against all the signers being tricked into approving the same bad transaction, which is how several of the largest crypto thefts have worked.Most company and project treasuries are run this way, so "signer on the multisig" in a job description means your approval would be one of the ones required.In 19 of 4,212 adverts
AI agentagentic AI, autonomous agent, onchain agent: Software that is given a goal and then takes a sequence of actions on its own to reach it — calling tools, fetching data, making decisions — rather than responding to one instruction at a time. What makes it distinct in crypto is that the agent can hold a wallet of its own, so it can pay, trade or settle without a person approving each step.The label is used loosely, covering everything from serious infrastructure work such as giving agents spending limits and revocable permissions down to marketing a chatbot, so it is worth asking which one the role is.In 136 of 4,212 adverts
SolidityEVM development: The programming language most blockchain programs on Ethereum are written in. It also runs on the many other chains that copied Ethereum's design, so the skill carries across a large part of the industry.A Solidity role is specifically the blockchain-facing part of the engineering; the website, the app and the backend around it are written in ordinary languages.In 97 of 4,212 adverts
RustRust developer, Solana program: A general-purpose programming language used widely outside crypto, valued for speed and for catching a class of memory bugs before the code ever runs. In crypto it is the language of Solana's programs — the ones that run on the blockchain itself — and of much of the core infrastructure elsewhere, such as node software and indexers.Because Rust is popular in ordinary software too, many adverts asking for it are not crypto-specific at all; check whether the role writes programs that run on a blockchain or ordinary backend services.

Every term here was counted against the 4,212 jobs posted on Find Web3 in the twelve months to 23 Sep 2026, matched on whole words. A few of them - custody, governance - have an ordinary business meaning as well as a crypto one, so read a count as how often the word appears rather than how often the crypto sense is meant.