In response to the rapidly expanding cryptocurrency sector, some major financial players are investing a lot of effort to adapt their business to the new asset class, including the challenger bank Revolut.
Indeed, the London-based Revolut Ltd. is planning to grow its crypto workforce by 20%, bringing in employees in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the next six months, Bloomberg’s Aisha S Gani reported on August 4.
Specifically, the company has recently listed job ads for 13 crypto-related positions, such as in departments for compliance and financial prevention, software engineering and legal affairs.
Growing the crypto workforce despite downturn
According to Emil Urmanshin, Revolut’s crypto general manager, crypto currently accounts for around 5% to 10% of the company’s global revenue. He also explained Revolut’s optimistic view of crypto in spite of the recent industry downturn:
“We see crypto as a long-term play and remain bullish on the crypto industry.”
For this reason, the company has already brought in 43 crypto-related workers since the beginning of 2022, increasing the crypto team’s size three times compared to July 2021.
The company is unfazed by the recent slump in the crypto market but is instead focused on the clients’ growing interest in digital assets, with Urmanshin stressing that:
“Although there has been turmoil, interest in crypto assets has increased and we still have more customers trading crypto than during July 2021.”
Meanwhile, other companies are cutting down on their staff as a consequence of the said market sell-off, including Coinbase which laid off 1,100 or 18% of its team in June, as well as Gemini, Crypto.com, BlockFi, Bitpanda, and others.
Revolut’s history with crypto
As it happens, Revolut’s interest in crypto is nothing new, as the challenger bank grew its crypto trading service with support for Cardano (ADA), Uniswap (UNI), Synthetix (SNX), Yearn Finance (YFI), Uma (UMA), Bancor (BNT), Filecoin (FIL), Numeraire (NMR), Loopring (LRC), Orchid (OXT), and The Graph (GRT), back in April 2021.
Before that, Revolut had already supported buying and selling of Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), XRP, Stellar (XLM), EOS, OMG Network (OMG), Tezos (XTZ), and 0x (ZRX).
More recently, in February, the neobank silently introduced the decentralized finance (DeFi) meme token Shiba Inu (SHIB) to its banking app, as Finbold reported.
