How the Demand for Professionals in Blockchain is Shaping the Future of Finance

Blockchain and digital assets have moved from the fringe of finance towards something closer to the mainstream, and one practical consequence is that a growing minority of senior finance candidates now have crypto or digital-asset experience on their CVs — from crypto exchanges, digital-asset funds, blockchain-native businesses, or corporates piloting distributed-ledger projects. For those candidates, and for the businesses considering them, a real question follows: does that experience help or hurt when you’re hiring or being hired for a senior finance role? The honest answer is that it depends heavily on the business doing the hiring, and the pattern is worth understanding whichever side of the table you’re on.

A small but growing part of the candidate pool

It’s worth being realistic about scale first. Candidates with material blockchain or digital-asset experience are still a modest share of the UK senior finance market — a small minority of CFO and FD CVs, though a noticeably larger one than a few years ago. The rhetoric around crypto and finance often runs ahead of the reality: the number of conventional UK senior finance roles that actually require or actively reward blockchain experience remains small. So while the trend is real and rising, a candidate betting their entire positioning on digital-asset experience being in demand across the market would be getting ahead of where UK hiring actually is. It matters in specific places, not everywhere.

The same experience reads very differently depending on the buyer

The single most useful thing to understand is that identical digital-asset experience lands completely differently depending on the hiring business. Broadly, senior finance employers fall into two camps when they see a crypto or blockchain background.

Digital-asset-native and fintech businesses value it

For a crypto exchange, a digital-asset fund, a stablecoin business, a payments/fintech firm, or any FCA-regulated cryptoasset business, direct experience is a genuine asset — often a requirement. These businesses face problems conventional finance leaders haven’t seen: accounting for digital assets, the specific regulatory perimeter around cryptoassets, custody and reconciliation of on-chain holdings, and the FCA’s registration and authorisation regimes. A finance leader who has already worked inside that environment is enormously more valuable to them than one who hasn’t, and this is where crypto experience is a clear positive on a CV.

Conventional businesses are more cautious — but not for the reason candidates assume

For a conventional PE-backed or traditional-industry business, the same crypto background is often treated as neutral, or occasionally as a mild concern. Candidates frequently misread why. The caution is usually not about technical capability — nobody doubts a crypto-exchange CFO can run a finance function. It’s about perceived fit: PE investors and conventional boards tend to prefer a career trajectory that looks predictable and finance discipline demonstrated in well-understood operating environments. A recent multi-year stint in a volatile, fast-moving crypto business can read, fairly or not, as a different kind of career than the one they’re looking for. Understanding that the objection is about pattern-fit rather than competence is the key to addressing it.

What this means if you’re a candidate with crypto experience

If your recent experience is in digital assets and you’re open to both worlds, the positioning that tends to work is to keep your conventional finance credentials firmly in view rather than letting the crypto period dominate your identity. Candidates who succeed in conventional senior roles despite — or alongside — a digital-asset background usually have solid conventional finance experience that the crypto period sits within, and they present it that way: an experienced finance leader who also happens to have specialist digital-asset capability, rather than “a crypto person.” The specialist experience then becomes incremental value rather than the headline that triggers the pattern-fit concern.

The corollary is a career-strategy point: committing entirely to blockchain-native businesses narrows your options if you later want to return to the conventional market, because the longer the crypto period runs unbalanced by conventional roles, the harder the pattern-fit conversation becomes. Many candidates are better served keeping a foot in both — maintaining strong conventional credentials in parallel — rather than going all-in on either side while the market is still this asymmetric.

What this means if you’re hiring

For businesses, the lesson runs the other way. If you’re a conventional business, a crypto background on a strong candidate’s CV is worth looking past rather than screening out — the underlying finance capability is usually intact, and you may be discarding excellent candidates on a pattern-fit instinct that doesn’t reflect their actual ability. If you’re a digital-asset or FCA-regulated cryptoasset business, the reverse discipline applies: conventional finance polish alone isn’t enough, and you should weight genuine familiarity with the digital-asset regulatory and operational environment heavily, because the gap between “good CFO” and “good CFO who understands cryptoasset regulation” is large and hard to close quickly.

This is precisely the kind of judgement a specialist recruiter earns its fee on — reading whether a given candidate’s background genuinely fits a given business’s context, rather than applying a blanket “crypto good” or “crypto risky” rule. The right answer is entirely situational, and getting it right is the difference between a strong hire and a mismatch.

The direction of travel

Over the next few years the digital-asset share of senior finance experience will keep growing, and UK regulation is steadily maturing — the FCA’s cryptoasset regime is becoming more defined, which tends to pull crypto businesses closer to conventional financial-services norms and, in turn, makes crypto experience read as less exotic to conventional employers. As that convergence continues, the sharp two-camp split described here will probably soften. For now, though, it remains real, and both candidates and hiring businesses are best served by understanding which camp they’re in and positioning accordingly.

What digital-asset finance roles actually demand

It helps to be concrete about what the digital-asset-native side is actually looking for, because it isn’t generic “crypto enthusiasm” — it’s a specific set of capabilities that conventional finance roles rarely build. Accounting for digital assets is genuinely different: valuation, classification and disclosure of crypto holdings don’t map neatly onto conventional frameworks, and getting them wrong has audit and regulatory consequences. Custody and reconciliation raise problems a conventional treasury function never faces — reconciling on-chain balances, managing wallet security, and controlling assets that can be irreversibly lost. And the regulatory perimeter is its own discipline: understanding where a given activity sits relative to the FCA’s cryptoasset registration and authorisation regimes, the financial-promotions rules for cryptoassets, and the anti-money-laundering expectations specific to the sector. A finance leader who has operated inside all of that carries knowledge that takes a conventional candidate a long time to acquire, which is exactly why digital-asset businesses pay a premium for it and why conventional polish alone doesn’t substitute for it. For candidates, this is also the specialist value worth foregrounding — not “I worked in crypto” but “I can run the finance and regulatory side of a cryptoasset business,” which is a scarce and specific capability.

Beyond crypto: the wider digital-finance skill shift

It’s worth widening the lens slightly, because blockchain is one part of a broader shift in what senior finance roles increasingly touch. Digital payments, embedded finance, and the technology underpinning modern financial services are all creating demand for finance leaders who are comfortable at the intersection of finance and technology — not as engineers, but as leaders who understand how these systems work well enough to run the finance and control function around them. The same two-camp dynamic tends to apply: technology-forward and fintech businesses actively want that fluency, while more traditional businesses value it less and sometimes view it as tangential. But the direction is consistent — the share of senior finance roles that benefit from genuine comfort with financial technology is rising, and candidates who can credibly speak to it have a widening set of opportunities. For businesses in the payments and fintech space specifically, this fluency is often non-negotiable, and it is one of the areas where the conventional senior finance pool thins out quickly. Blockchain experience is, in that sense, one visible marker of a broader and more durable trend: finance leadership and technology fluency are converging, and the finance leaders who sit comfortably in both are increasingly the ones in demand.

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Adrian Lawrence

Adrian Lawrence FCA is the founder of FD Capital and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). He holds a BSc from Queen Mary College, University of London, and has over 25 years of experience as a Chartered Accountant and finance leader working with private, PE-backed and owner-managed businesses across the UK. He founded FD Capital to connect growing businesses with the Finance Directors and CFOs they need to scale — and personally interviews candidates for senior finance appointments.