Over the past three years, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at the University of CambridgeJudge Business School, has tracked and analysed the development of the global cryptoasset industry. Since the publication of the 2nd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study in December 2018, the industry has undergone significant changes: the 2017-2018 initial coin offering (ICO) bubble has sparked closer scrutiny from regulators resulting in greater efforts with regards to regulatory compliance, while new professional infrastructure and services have emerged to serve the increased interest from institutional investors. Mining analysts, for their part, have suggested that financial engineering is underway in the mining sector.

This report reviews some of these market trends and provides insights into the state of the cryptoasset industry. For the 3rd edition of its Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study, the CCAF gathered data from 280 entities from 59 countries and across four main market segments, namely exchange, payments, custody, and mining. The sample consists of 175 service providers, 75 mining companies and 30 individual miners. Data was collected between March and May 2020. The key findings from this global cryptoasset benchmarking study are as follows:

Analysing growth indicators of the cryptoasset industry

Full-time equivalent (FTE) employee growth slowed considerably following the late-2017 market

frenzy. Respondents across all market segments, reported year-on-year growth of 21% in 2019, down

from 57% in 2018.

Industry-wide, the growth in FTE employment declined by 36 percentage points between 2017 and

2019, whereas the median firm reported a 75-percentage point downward change in employment

growth. The difference in the industry-level and the firm-level employment growth figures reflects the

rise of large firms within each industry group that dominates in the aggregate change in employment and

suggests that a few large players are dominating the industry.