Web3’s Next Winners Will Be Built by Leaner, Denser Teams 

Somewhere between 2021 and 2023, a significant portion of the Web3 industry learned, at a considerable cost, that the same logic driving a bull market hiring surge can work just as efficiently in reverse. During the peak of these years, the sector added staff at a pace that made traditional tech look conservative, but when token prices fell, revenue projections were revised sharply downward, and corrections arrived fast. 

Over 26,000 crypto employees lost their jobs in 2022 alone, with Coinbase and Kraken eliminating 20% and 30% of their workforces, respectively. In fact, by some estimates, the crypto sector as a whole shed roughly 40 percent of its total workforce between 2022 and 2024, leading many to believe that the organizational model being used by the industry was not sustainable.

That said, the firms that avoided the worst of that cycle tended to share a common characteristic, i.e., they had not hired for scale. Infrastructure-focused companies that kept building through the contraction, especially those working on Layer 2 performance, cryptographic tooling, enterprise compliance systems, and cross-chain interoperability, were often the ones that emerged stronger. Startale, the company behind the Ethereum Layer 2 network Soneium, reflects this shift clearly, having continued to expand its infrastructure footprint without adopting the oversized organizational structures that defined much of the previous crypto cycle. 

The Case for Depth Over Scale

The concept of talent density, i.e., building organizations around exceptional capability per person rather than total headcount, applies with particular force in deep infrastructure development. In fact, the teams responsible for the most significant technical advances in crypto have consistently been small by enterprise standards. 

For instance, the original Ethereum team, who were behind the first practical implementations of zero-knowledge proofs, and the engineers who built the EVM architecture that most L2s still depend on, were each operating with a fraction of the headcount their output might suggest.

And while job postings in the sector have rebounded in recent years (47 percent in 2025), the demand for fresh talent seems to have drifted toward compliance engineers, security specialists, AI-Web3 hybrid architects, and enterprise systems integrators, basically the disciplines where the gap between a strong hire and an average one produces outsized consequences for what actually gets shipped.

Building What Does Not Fully Exist Yet

The particular challenge Startale is working on (i.e., regulated, institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure that also functions at consumer scale) involves technical problems without established playbooks. To this point, Soneium has recently surpassed 600 million transactions and 5.4 million active wallets since launching during Q1 2025.

Furthermore, the 250-plus independent developer-built applications now live on Soneium (spanning gaming, music, AI-driven content, and creator tools) are evidence of what that kind of cross-disciplinary depth makes possible at scale. So is the Startale Superstars incubation program, which offers a $250,000 prize pool designed to attract developers capable of building for audiences that may never know they are interacting with a blockchain.

That cross-disciplinary depth, where each specialist understands enough of adjacent disciplines to integrate their work effectively, is not something that can be approximated by adding more personnel but by making deliberate decisions.

In sum, the broader takeaway for Web3 does not seem to be overtly complicated, as the companies that emerged from the 2022-2024 contraction in the strongest technical position were largely those that optimized for depth rather than scale. The ones now building the infrastructure (primed to define the next crypto innovation cycle) are doing so with lean teams by any conventional measure.