Industry-Funded Study Puts US Crypto Employment at 34,000 Direct Jobs

The National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA) published a report on 22 July 2026 estimating that crypto companies in the United States directly employ 34,000 people. The study, titled "Crypto at Work: Assessing the Industry's Economic Footprint in the U.S. Labor Market", was funded by the NCA and carried out by the Pragmatic Policy Group (PPG), an economic research firm. It was announced through Business Wire from Miami on the same day.

Alongside the direct employment figure, the report estimates that the industry supports 232,000 jobs in total across the US economy, contributes 55 billion dollars to US gross domestic product in 2026 and supports 31 billion dollars in worker income. PPG chief economist Oliver Browne led the study.

The 34,000 figure refers to direct full-time equivalent positions at crypto firms. The 232,000 figure is a modelled total that includes jobs at suppliers and jobs sustained by the spending of those workers. The report states explicitly in its appendix that the 232,000 total does "not represent direct employment by crypto companies".

How the 232,000 figure is built

The report splits the employment estimate into three channels, following standard input-output practice.

Direct employment covers 34,000 people on the payroll of crypto companies, including software engineers, compliance officers, customer support staff and financial analysts.

Indirect employment covers a further 75,000 jobs at suppliers. The report gives cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, legal counsel, insurance, accounting and office space as examples of purchases that support employment further along the supply chain.

Induced employment covers a further 123,000 jobs, generated when workers in the first two categories spend their wages on groceries, housing, restaurants and healthcare.

Adding the three channels gives 232,000. On that basis the report states that each direct crypto job supports roughly six additional jobs elsewhere in the economy. In the press release, Browne said each direct crypto job "generates around six additional roles across the broader economy". Stu Alderoty, president of the NCA, said the data showed "the crypto industry in America has become an economic driver".

The industry comparison, and what it rests on

The report compares its 34,000 direct jobs against four benchmark industries: coffee and tea manufacturing at 28,400 jobs, aerospace robotics at 26,000, cement manufacturing at 15,300 and tobacco manufacturing at 10,600.

The footnote to that chart sets out the basis. The benchmark data come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, published in 2025, and refer to the year 2024. Two entries are exceptions: aerospace robotics and crypto are both reported for 2026. The aerospace robotics figure is worldwide; the other benchmarks are US only.

The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages covers establishments in the United States and does not report employment outside the country. The report does not name a separate source for the worldwide aerospace robotics figure. It also does not define what the aerospace robotics category covers, so it is not stated whether the 26,000 refers to people employed by manufacturers of aerospace robotics, to robotics roles inside aerospace companies, or to some other grouping.

The comparison therefore places a 2026 estimate for a broadly defined services, finance and technology sector against 2024 observed headcounts for narrowly defined manufacturing categories, with one worldwide figure among them.

Bitcoin Magazine, reporting on the study on the day of publication, noted that by raw headcount crypto "remains a small employer" and described the benchmark set as "hardly the scale of a major American industry".

Economic contribution

The report puts the industry's direct contribution to US gross domestic product at 13 billion dollars in 2026. Supply chain activity accounts for a further 18 billion dollars, and household spending by directly and indirectly supported workers for a further 24 billion dollars. The three add up to the headline 55 billion dollars.

The report specifies that this figure is gross value added, meaning gross output adjusted for intermediate inputs and other expenditures, and not the revenue of crypto companies.

The largest single sector in the modelled contribution is securities, commodity contracts and investments at 9.7 billion dollars. It is followed by Federal Reserve banks, credit intermediation and related activities at 5.3 billion dollars, then miscellaneous professional, scientific and technical services and data processing, internet publishing and other information services at 3.6 billion dollars each. Housing accounts for 3.0 billion dollars, other real estate and administrative and support services for 1.8 billion dollars each, insurance carriers and wholesale trade for 1.5 billion dollars each, and ambulatory health care services for 1.2 billion dollars.

The wage figure and its definition

The report gives an average annual wage of 133,000 dollars, against a national median of 64,000 dollars. For comparison it cites 104,000 dollars in information and technology, 76,000 dollars in manufacturing, 54,000 dollars in retail trade and 49,000 dollars in leisure and hospitality, all attributed to BLS earnings data for 2026.

The definition of the 133,000 dollar figure is set out in two footnotes in the report. It is the "average pay across all supported jobs" and is "based on the total jobs supported by the crypto industry". It therefore covers the full 232,000 modelled positions, including the indirect and induced ones, and is not the average salary of an employee at a crypto company. The report's executive summary and its wage comparison chart both label the figure as a crypto wage without repeating that qualification in the label itself.

The 31 billion dollars in worker income is a component of the 55 billion dollar total, not an addition to it.

What the study counts as the crypto industry

PPG defines the sector across eight segments and names example companies for each.

1. Consensus and network infrastructure: mining, staking and node operations. Examples given are Marathon Digital, Riot Platforms and Foundry USA.
2. CeFi and DeFi financial services: trading, custody, lending and decentralised finance. Examples are Coinbase, Kraken, Aave and Uniswap.
3. Protocol and crypto infrastructure: blockchain protocols, smart contracts and decentralised applications. Examples are Solana Labs, Ava Labs and Circle.
4. Corporate and enterprise: businesses using blockchain for payments, tokenisation and digital services. Examples are Ripple, IBM, PayPal and Visa.
5. Professional services: legal, tax, audit and compliance support for crypto firms. Examples are PwC, EY and Cooley LLP.
6. Traditional market infrastructure: ETFs, prime brokerage, clearing and regulated trading venues. Examples are BlackRock, Fidelity and CME Group.
7. Security and compliance: risk management, analytics and regulatory compliance. Examples are Chainalysis, Elliptic and CipherTrace.
8. Capital formation: equity, venture and institutional funding. Examples are a16z Crypto, Pantera Capital and Paradigm.

Occupational structure of the direct jobs

The report breaks the 34,000 direct positions into eleven occupation groups.

Occupation group	Jobs
Software, blockchain and data engineering	10,100
Compliance, finance and business operations	5,450
Executives and managers	5,100
Business operations and administrative support	4,760
Sales and business development	2,470
Hardware and systems engineering	1,480
Legal and regulatory counsel	1,160
Product design, content and creative	860
Digital infrastructure and operations	550
Research, analytics and science	520
Other occupations	1,550
Total	34,000

Engineering roles account for 10,100 of the 34,000, or just under 30 percent. The report describes this occupational split as a modelling result rather than an observed count, a point covered in the methodology section below.

For the 198,000 indirect and induced positions, the largest groups in the report are office and administrative support at 24,500, transportation and material moving at 18,300, sales at 17,100, food preparation and serving at 16,900 and production occupations at 16,800.

Regional distribution

The report allocates the national totals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. California leads with 57,649 supported jobs and 16.9 billion dollars in economic contribution, followed by New York with 53,766 jobs and 10.7 billion dollars, and Texas with 26,536 jobs and 5.4 billion dollars. Washington follows with 15,097 jobs and North Carolina with 9,524.

California, New York and Texas together account for 60 percent of the modelled jobs. The next tier is Georgia with 6,529, Florida with 5,935, Colorado with 5,797, Illinois with 5,760 and Connecticut with 5,064. The smallest allocations are Alaska with 86 jobs and Vermont with 93.

The report groups twelve central states as the Heartland, namely Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, and puts their combined total above 17,000 jobs.

Two states are treated as case studies. Colorado is credited with 5,800 supported jobs and 1.3 billion dollars in contribution; the report notes that Denver hosted 131 blockchain firms backed by 571 million dollars in investment by 2025, and that Colorado was the first US state to accept crypto payments for taxes. North Dakota is credited with more than 800 jobs and 154 million dollars, with the report citing mining infrastructure from Atlas Power, Rhodium, Core Scientific and Phoenix Group, a flare gas pilot run by ExxonMobil and Crusoe Energy, and a planned dollar-backed stablecoin called Roughrider Coin from the Bank of North Dakota and Fiserv.

The report states that because of data limitations and unobserved remote workers, state level totals may not fully capture all national industry activity.

Methodology and stated limitations

PPG used a standard input-output model built on the Bureau of Economic Analysis 2024 input-output tables, with employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Because crypto is not a standalone industry in the BEA framework, the authors mapped crypto businesses onto existing classifications. These include miscellaneous professional, scientific and technical services; securities, commodity contracts and investments; Federal Reserve banks and credit intermediation; data processing and internet publishing; publishing except internet, which includes software; electrical equipment and components; and rental and leasing services. The report gives one worked example: financial-related crypto revenue was allocated 97 percent to securities, commodity contracts and investments and 3 percent to data processing and internet publishing.

The model input is an estimated US crypto industry revenue of 23.22 billion dollars. The report says this figure comes from Statista as of January 2026, that it is also referenced in an independent academic paper, and that a bottom-up cross-check reconstructing revenues from a sample of major US crypto firms produced a range of roughly 24 to 27 billion dollars. On that basis the authors describe the 23.22 billion dollar input as reasonable and conservative.

The report lists three standard assumptions: that production relationships between industries remain consistent with the 2024 US economic structure, that industries respond proportionally to changes in demand, and that the results reflect 2024 US economic conditions.

On the occupational split, the authors are explicit that no observed dataset exists. Because "a dedicated crypto workforce profile does not yet exist", they mapped crypto's financial activities to the occupational mix of technology-oriented sectors rather than that of financial industries, and state that this "should be read as a modeling assumption". They cite Dragonfly's crypto compensation report and a 2020 academic paper on blockchain skills in the Australian labour market as supporting evidence for the sector's technology-intensive character.

The report also notes that while the NCA funded the research, the findings are based on PPG's independent analysis.

Context

The NCA is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit launched in 2025. It published its second annual State of Crypto Holders Report in May 2026, which put US crypto ownership at 67 million people, or 26 percent of adults, a figure the Crypto at Work report cites in its industry overview. PPG describes Crypto at Work as the first study to assess the crypto industry's US labour market footprint on an economy-wide basis, and states that previous research covered individual segments of the sector.