I noticed there were a lot of job listings for crypto which just stayed up for ages. I suspect they had trouble hiring as they need someone smart enough to work on this stuff, while also lacking the ethics to avoid scamming people, and often being dumb enough to be scammed themselves in to having part of their payment be rug pull tokens with conditions blocking selling for x months/years (after the pull)
These no hope listings probably inflated numbers a fair bit.
Crypto companies have a more sinister reason for keeping job postings up.
It's all about marketing for crypto companies that have tokens on exchanges. Their goal is to raise the token price so they can dump on retail. Having many active job postings show that they're active in development and they have plenty of money to keep the project going. If they don't have any job postings, it can be interpreted that they've already rug pulled.
It's all part of how they fool the gullible.
There are literally analytics companies that use job postings as a data point for crypto companies to see if they're active or rug pulled.
Keeping job postings up is free.
Source: Worked in and consulted for a few crypto companies years ago and analyzed many crypto scams.
I have coworkers who were offered tokens in a previous engagement. They were given the option to sell the tokens as soon as they received them (and receive cash instead), and they made quite a lot of money from them.
I subscribe to a couple RSS feeds for some remote job sites.
A very large % of jobs are for crypto (ok "fintech" but look closely it's crypto) in March 2023. I wonder how these companies are still going, or maybe the listings just haven't been taken down yet.
These no hope listings probably inflated numbers a fair bit.