What does it mean to be crypto native?
"I need someone crypto native."
It's one of the most common requests we hear from hiring managers. Yet when pressed for details, hiring managers struggle to define what they actually mean. This vague term has become a catch-all requirement that can mean anything from "is on Crypto Twitter" to "has shipped smart contracts" to “uses crypto products.” For teams trying to find the right candidates, this ambiguity creates a frustrating bottleneck — calibration takes longer, interviewer time is wasted, and the business lags.
We asked Founders, Recruiters, Builders, and Investors a simple question:
What does it mean to be crypto native?
Terminally Online
Cultural fluency (especially via Crypto Twitter) came up at the beginning of almost every conversation.
Chris Shu (Talent at Paradigm) described crypto nativity as having “a really good understanding of the ecosystem… you’re in the Twitter circles, you’re seeing stuff as it comes out. You know the narratives, you know what teams are shipping, you’re watching people in different ecosystems shilling, and you know what’s credible.” Beyond observing, learning how this world works means being able to efficiently parse through the constant stream of information and decipher signal from noise. Jay Hinz (Operations at Privy) described this discernment as taste: "I can scroll the timeline and tell what is going on in crypto within 10 minutes or can tell you what the most important thing was this week, this month, this year … It’s having taste. It's like a chef who can tell if a steak is done.”
Once someone develops taste, they can see the coordination between the players and the game around them. Alex Xu (aka Zagabond, Founder of Azuki) makes this connection explicit: “If you're crypto native, that means you understand Crypto Twitter. It's where the culture happens. It’s almost like learning a language. And once you learn that language, you're able to start to see coordination, mechanism design, and ownership through a crypto lens.” Some go beyond understanding the game of crypto and begin playing the game themselves. Breck Stodghill (Investor at Haun Ventures) describes this level of immersion that crescendos into degen status: “Crypto-native implies you’re very current with the meta and the narrative – you’re in the eye of the tornado. The tornado is Crypto Twitter. It’s the only thing that you can think about. You're a five-tool person. You work in crypto. You tell your friends about crypto. You trade crypto. You've made a lot of money. You've lost a lot of money. You're native to it.” To be crypto native is to be fluent in this cultural ecosystem, actively participate in it, and be borderline obsessive.
However, as we dug deeper, we discovered that cultural familiarity isn’t always what hiring managers actually want — or even what they mean — when they add ‘crypto native’ as a requirement to a role. Instead, they often want role-specific depth.
Dig Deep
While cultural fluency provides the foundation of crypto nativity, performing at a high level in any job requires specific domain knowledge and experience. When hiring managers add “crypto native” as a requirement, they’re often using it as shorthand for this role-specific expertise beyond general ecosystem knowledge. Our interviews revealed that the practical definition of crypto nativity varies significantly depending on the role you’re hiring for.
Crypto Nativity for Technical Roles
For engineering roles, crypto nativity is less about understanding Crypto Twitter narratives and more focused on hands-on experience building blockchains, their components, or dApps on top of them.
“When we say crypto native on the engineering side, it's somebody that understands the core concepts — blocks, transactions, hashes, wallets, etc.” noted Garrett Hughes (Director of Engineering at Dune).
Karan Kurbur (Protocol Engineer at Tools for Humanity) takes this one step further: shipping. “Being crypto native means an engineer has shipped something in production. They didn't just think about the theoretical math; they’ve dealt with the infrastructure — the nodes, the indexers, the wallets. They've felt the pain of building and shipping.”
Some will take this to its natural conclusion — deep and informed opinions on the tech. Patrick O’Grady (Founder of Commonware) explains, “Crypto-native' to me is someone who can explain what's happening under the hood: execution ordering, P2P identities, validator incentives— then give an opinion on why it's good or bad. They can get into granular detail on trade-offs and preferences.”
This practical, battle-tested experience leads to a deeper understanding of how blockchain systems work under the hood — which is often what hiring managers are really looking for when they want to recruit a crypto-native engineer.
Crypto Nativity for Non-Technical Roles
For non-technical roles like marketing, business development, legal, recruiting, and finance, hiring managers want candidates who have used on-chain products, understand crypto ecosystems, and can relate with users.
"In customer-facing roles, we need crypto native people who have empathy for on-chain crypto builders and users. They tried to build something on-chain or they are actively using the blockchain. They can speak to the friction and pain.” explains Forrest Norwood (Director of Strategy at Conduit). For these roles, crypto nativity is measured by one’s ability to speak authentically about pain points because they have experienced them firsthand.
This empathy translates into practical advantages across different functions. Justin Vogel (Founder of Safary) describes how having hands-on experience with DeFi protocols helps make his growth team more effective. "[They are] more plugged in, getting airdrops, messing around with different DeFi protocols. We market to DeFi companies and ecosystems, so the fact that my team is more dialed into those things and helping customers think about their growth is useful.”
Another practical advantage shows up in business development roles, where crypto nativity naturally helps build the professional networks that can make someone exponentially more effective. Joe Wadcan (Head of Corp Dev at Phantom) noted, “I didn't think it should matter, but it does matter a lot. It actually ends up helping the people who do this job do it two to three times better if you have ecosystem expertise... folks who have relationships that we can go to immediately. We can knock on the door. We don't need introductions. We can go right in.”
Here for the Tech
Beyond cultural fluency and role-specific expertise lies a deeper dimension of crypto nativity: alignment with the underlying values and mindset that drive the industry. While someone can learn to navigate Crypto Twitter or ship a smart contract, the values that sustain long-term commitment to the space represent another factor hiring managers often look for.
For some, crypto nativity is about interest in the technology’s value itself. Danning Sui (Research Director at Pantera) describes how these values are essential to being crypto native: “They need to care about the fundamental value blockchain tech is building towards, decentralization, censorship resistance, permissionlessness, self-sovereignty, etc. They need to be somewhat idealistic. Otherwise, they’ll leave once the market drops.” Being aligned with these values gives hiring managers more confidence that candidates actually care about what they are building and why, and won’t just leave when the natural market cycles fluctuate.
While some emphasize values alignment, others look for specific character traits they associate with being crypto native. Armand Khatri (Head of Ecosystem at Ondo Finance) explains, "The most common error in defining 'crypto-native' is placing excessive weight on tangible, often learnable, technical skills... while underestimating the significance of intrinsic, enduring traits. While technical operations can be taught, the inherent curiosity, intellectual agility, and proactive drive to continuously learn and adapt are more definitive characteristics of true crypto-nativity.”
Of these intrinsic traits, curiosity emerged most frequently across our conversations. Christina Beltramini (Head of BD and Corp Dev at Aave Labs) made this point explicit: “What I care about is genuine curiosity and the drive to recognize and close their own knowledge gaps. The strongest people never stop learning. ‘Crypto native’ can just as easily mean those who’ve built transferable foundations in other fields and bring those skills into crypto. But what is crucial is an open mindset and those already exploring, using tools, reading docs, and asking great questions. In an industry that changes daily, real strength lies in learning fast, adapting, and continuously growing.”
Prioritizing curiosity over existing knowledge was echoed by other hiring managers, and point towards long-term success in the industry. Steve Yelderman (General Counsel at Etherealize) reflected on his time at Coinbase: "When I was a hiring manager at Coinbase, I was much more interested in people's dexterity and curiosity than in their actual base of knowledge. Because the space moves so fast, there's so many new problems... if I ask for someone who is crypto native, I actually want someone who is really good at learning new technology. That’s the only way they’ll keep up with the space going forward.”
Curiosity came up so frequently that many people used ‘crypto curious’ as shorthand. This consistent emphasis on long-term orientation, drive, and curiosity as core attributes may supersede the knowledge and practical skills previously described. Curiosity leads to exploring the tech, which leads to following the news on Twitter. This leads to an understanding and participation in the crypto, using products in the space, and hands-on building. The more the industry and tech, the more empathy one builds along the way, and the more relationships are developed which enables professionals to be more effective in their roles.
When hiring managers use 'crypto native' as a requirement, they're often using it as a proxy for specific character traits.
How do you assess for ‘crypto nativity’?
Understanding what crypto nativity means is one thing; actually evaluating it in candidates is another. Based on our interviews with hiring managers, founders, and recruiters, there are a wide range of approaches to assessing for crypto nativity.
Based on our conversations, we recommend mirroring one's assessment to the criteria we identified above — breadth & cultural awareness, depth & hands-on experience, and values & character traits.
For breadth and awareness, one person with a large social media following probes on how online someone is: "I want to see if someone can pick a topic and passionately talk about it. It shows up in anecdotal knowledge, if they understand what people are talking about this week or last week on Twitter - the memes, jokes, trolls, or general sentiments people are laughing at. They get their hands dirty as actual users and speak fluent crypto politics."
To assess for hands-on product experience, Mike Williams (Talent Lead at Flashbots) asks: “What's something you really like in crypto, care about, or have used?’ Then we'll walk through that ... ‘What do you think is really good about that, what’s terrible, why is it different than other products?’” Nick Martitsch (Head of GTM at Paradigm) goes one step further and pushes for nuanced opinions on strategy of products and ecosystems for BD hires: “Assessment is about getting deep into the actual knowledge and applied strategy. I ask them to pick an ecosystem. Then ask why they picked that ecosystem, and why are you bullish on it? I ask them to pick a certain type of application to prioritize. Why will that have staying power versus others? Any question that's strategy-related is going to reveal how well they can defend their opinions.” This approach tests a level of depth and informed strategic thinking where candidates will have nuanced opinions based on their hands-on experience in the space.
For technical depth, Georgios Konstantopoulos (CTO at Paradigm) gets into the actual code with candidates and assesses their attention to detail. “I get on a call with them and ask them to walk me through a code base or their GitHub. You can tell who is working on something for the craft — there are late night commits, they’re working on the weekend, there is proper architecture, nice abstractions, they take care of good documentation. Details.”
When assessing values alignment, leaders focus on alignment around character traits and core value principles. Steph Marcellin (Head of Talent at Uniswap) optimizes for learners: "I look for people who can't help but follow their curiosity down the rabbit hole – constantly learning, asking questions that spark more questions, and genuinely excited to absorb everything they can.” Varun Srinivasan (Co-founder of Farcaster) adapts the value of decentralization to the needs of the project: “I care about an orientation towards permissionlessness — the key practical value to build and launch without gatekeepers. We’re less ideological about maximum decentralization at every level of the stack; where a project chooses to decentralize matters based on what they’re building.” Will Warren (Co-CEO of 0x Labs) leans into long-term conviction beyond market price when identifying future team members: “In crypto, we need builders who are building for decades, not just the next market cycle. We ask every candidate — how will you react when there’s a market downturn and token prices drop 90%? What will you do? What will give you conviction to keep building? We want to see some personal connection to the tech, some understanding of the global impact of blockchains, some kind of long-term conviction beyond price.”
When is it important to prioritize hiring for ‘crypto nativity’?
One important factor is the stage of a company. Zack Skelly (Head of Talent at Dragonfly) made this point explicit: "It's significantly more important for early-stage teams because of mentorship bandwidth and shipping velocity... Early teams are trying to ship fast. If a new hire already understands the tech stack, they're shipping in weeks instead of months. Founders value this."
This creates a clear resource trade-off: early-stage companies need immediate impact, while mature, larger companies can invest in developing their staff. Patrick O'Grady (Founder of Commonware) noted this contrast: "Early-stage teams lack the bandwidth to teach people how blockchains and other web3 technologies work. If you're at a five- or six-hundred-person company, you're more established. You have people who can mentor [new hires]. You can absorb more ramp for people coming from another domain … I briefly taught the Welcome to Coinbase crypto class to every new hire. Getting into the foundations of asymmetric key cryptography and blockchains, and in those classes, I think 95% of people had no idea what I was talking about. It requires patience to help employees “get it."
Beyond company stage, the importance of crypto nativity also varies significantly by role. Andrew Huang (CEO of Conduit) explains: "For something like go-to-market, it's important. It's part of the job that you have to know what's going on in the industry. So the only way to do that in crypto is to be online... because it's an online industry. For engineers, it's less important that you're on Twitter and more important that you understand the technology and that you're aware of new advances. In those roles, it may actually be a negative to be on Twitter because it’s distracting and confusing." The importance of crypto nativity will change depending on the role requirements and what makes each person successful in the job.
In some executive roles, it’s possible that teams may not want someone who is crypto native. Mehdi Hasan leads Exec Talent at a16z and believes there may be other more important factors to optimize around when hiring senior talent. He noted, “When hiring for an executive, teams need to be clear on what they’re prioritizing. If you’re hiring for a VP of Engineering, you need someone who can manage people well, allocate resources, and work across eng, product, and business. You’d probably prefer to bring in someone really high caliber from web2. Most of the crypto native people won’t have experience scaling, and you’ll lean too hard into their technical depth — which isn’t what you want out of that role. Being crypto native might even be a disservice to the position.”
So, what does it mean to be crypto native?
There is no consistent definition.
While there are common themes and hallmarks, the definition ultimately changes depending on the person, the role, and the team you are hiring for – which makes it highly context dependent.
We’ve grown accustomed to using it as a catch-all phrase, but in actuality, ‘crypto nativity’ is a set of concepts that describes someone who genuinely cares about crypto.
It’s on hiring managers and recruiters to operationalize these concepts when building their teams, decide when it’s important and in what ways for the roles they’re hiring for, and test for it accordingly. Don’t just slap it on as another vague requirement.
