The blockchain market is hot; here's how to learn the skills for it

Blockchain developers are in short supply and hot demand.

The job of developing blockchain distributed ledgers for businesses was recently ranked second among the top 20 fastest-growing job skills, and postings for workers with those skills grew more than 200% last year.

Salaries for blockchain developer or "engineer" positions are accordingly high, with median salaries in the U.S. hovering around $130,000 a year; that compares to general software developers, whose annual median pay is $105,000, according to Matt Sigelman, CEO of job data analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies.

In high-tech regions of the U.S. such as Silicon Valley, New York City or Boston, a blockchain developer has a median annual salary of $158,000 – an $18,000 premium over salaries for general software developers.

People with experience with specific blockchain iterations, such as Solidity and Hyperledger Composer, are in even higher demand – and that demand is increasing steadily, said Eric Piscini, a principal in the technology and banking practices at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

"This is the number one thing I have in mind when I wake up in the morning: 'Where will I find more engineers to join the team,'" Piscini said via email.

Solidity is a blockchain programming language for creating smart contracts (self-executing scripts); Hyperledger Composer is an open-source version of blockchain based on JavaScript; it has REST API support that allows non-developers and developers to create business networks.

Along with Hyperledger, Ethereum is the world's leading blockchain platform and both are the basis for a myriad of decentralized applications (Dapps), from smart contracts to cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum's Ether.

Just below blockchain engineers on the list of the fastest-growing jobs is a related skill: bitcoin cryptocurrency developers. (Blockchain is the technology that underpins bitcoin.)

Taking second fiddle only to robotics specialists, blockchain and bitcoin developers are advertising their services for as much as $200 per hour, according to Upwork, an employment site that specializes in freelance workers.

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