“It’s more than just finding someone with an awareness of what blockchain is, or what a specific product is,” Fraser said during a City Council oversight hearing Wednesday. “But someone who can take the information and help drive the problem forward.”
Because the state Department of Finance regulates the industry, the job of the city’s policy advisors will be to work on municipal uses for blockchain technology.
Whoever ends up filling the job will take on projects such as identifying and building out uses for blockchain in the city’s goals and working with other departments through administration to get digital assets up and running. Fraser said his department is also in the process of forming a Blockchain Working Group, which the two political advisers will join. Fraser said he envisioned someone coming from a job in program or product management at a blockchain firm.
The job, first posted in June 2022, will pay between $75,000 and $160,000 per year, which could be a pay cut for some candidates. A public systems engineering manager at industrial software firm Chainalysis can earn between $198,000 and $242,000 in base salary, according to an open listing on the company’s jobs page. An external manager of business operations in the product and engineering organization at crypto exchange Coinbase lists $206,125 to $242,500 as the base range. City salaries are closer to the range for a senior technical product manager position at BNY Mellon, which became an official digital asset depository platform in October, listing a salary range of $108,000 to $208,000. The city is currently paying to promote the job on LinkedIn.
Fraser emphasized that the two jobs were evidence of his office’s commitment to finding uses for blockchain in city government, which goes beyond the mayor’s decision to take his first paychecks in cryptocurrency. Fraser said he saw potential near-term blockchain use cases in helping to track and store vital records such as births and deaths, or to manage titles and deeds to homes. Further down the line, he believed the new technology could be a lifeline for those locked out of traditional banking, saying there were ideas in the pipeline that weren’t yet ready to be shared publicly.
The third vacant job has existed for more than two years, and is a more general technology position at the Department of Social Services that requires expertise in the blockchain. That job, according to a security operations center director, is for someone who is able to “identify, recommend and help procure innovative threat and compliance monitoring systems … that use the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, analytics and blockchain.” “
Several of the items on Fraser’s blockchain to-do list, like the vitality records, will actually touch on work done in social services and human resource management, meaning blockchain applications won’t be displaced in the technology department. “We want a foundation of skilled people across the city who can lead the next generation from a technical perspective,” he said.
