Coinbase gears up to hire hundreds of engineers in India, with a sweetener of $1,000 in crypto for new starters

• Coinbase will recruit hundreds of "world-class" engineers for its new Indian tech hub, it said Friday.
• New starters will get $1,000 in digital currency, in hopes they'll use it to learn about crypto.
• The crypto exchange is also exploring acquisition of start-ups in India as part of the push.

Coinbase plans to hire hundreds of engineers and other staff for its tech hub in India, who will each be given $1,000 in cryptocurrency when they start, the crypto exchange company said in a blog post Friday.

A "boom in cryptonative talent" prompted the recruitment spree, Pankaj Gupta, Coinbase's site lead in India wrote in the post.

The Indian hub, announced in March, will house engineering, software development, IT services and customer support. Employees will work remotely, at first, given pandemic concerns, but Coinbase expects to open its first physical office of many in Hyderabad.

"We have ambitious plans for this hub in the near future - we want to hire hundreds of world class engineers in the near term," Gupta wrote.

The $1,000 in crypto handed to new employees under the CIkka program - short for "Coinbase India Sikka" - is meant to inspire them to come up with ideas to develop the crypto exchange's range of services.

"Our expectation is that they'll leverage this offering to learn about crypto, and will use this knowledge to help us build the next generation of products," Gupta said.

Coinbase plans to set up locally-led teams in India across all the major areas it works in, from crypto to cloud, to machine learning to platform. While, they will be involved in both global and local projects, crypto investing in India also grew from $923 million until April 2020 to nearly $6.6 billion in May, Bloomberg reported.

"There's never been a more exciting time for builders working in crypto," Gupta said.

As part of the expansion in India, Coinbase is looking into possible start-up acquisitions and "acquihires" - where a company is bought to secure its talent - Gupta said.

Crypto adoption has grown worldwide, driven by increased popularity for decentralized finance, smart contracts and non-fungible tokens, which like bitcoin and ether are built on blockchains.

The hiring spree covers senior and junior roles across product management, user experience, design and program management. There will also be a HR and recruitment team.

India marked the next step in the company's global mission as it has already opened hubs in the US, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Canada and the Philippines.

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