How Web3 Engineering Changed From DeFi Summer to Today

TL;DR

• DeFi Summer pushed smart contract engineering, token design, and protocol development into the center of Web3 hiring.
• The years that followed created deeper careers across scaling, security, staking, MEV, data infrastructure, wallets, and zero-knowledge systems.
• Engineers now work across a much larger technical stack, and specialization has become more important.
• Hiring teams need to understand how the industry evolved because older Web3 experience can look very different from the skills needed today.

In 2020, much of Web3 engineering revolved around a relatively concentrated set of problems.

DeFi protocols were growing quickly, automated market makers were proving that financial markets could operate through smart contracts, liquidity mining was attracting users and capital, and governance tokens were changing how protocols thought about ownership.

Uniswap V2 launched in May 2020 with ERC-20 pairs, flash swaps, price oracles, and a redesigned architecture. Compound distributed COMP to users participating in its lending markets, while projects such as Yearn experimented with liquidity mining and community governance. These systems helped define the period now remembered as DeFi Summer.

For engineers, that period created demand for people who could build and audit smart contracts, understand token economics, integrate wallets, and develop interfaces around rapidly growing protocols.

Six years later, that technical market looks much wider.

Smart Contracts Became One Layer of a Larger Stack

Smart contract engineering remains important, but modern Web3 products depend on much more than contract code.

A team building today may also need engineers who understand rollup infrastructure, data availability, account abstraction, RPC systems, validators, MEV, interoperability, cryptographic proofs, indexing, institutional settlement, and wallet security.

Ethereum’s own evolution helps show how much the stack has expanded. The network moved to proof of stake in 2022, introduced blob transactions for rollups through Dencun in 2024, expanded validator and blob capabilities with Pectra in 2025, and added PeerDAS with Fusaka later that year. Ethereum’s current scaling model relies heavily on Layer 2 systems and increasingly specialized infrastructure.

Each technical change creates work around it.

Rollups need sequencers, provers, bridges, monitoring, and data infrastructure. Proof-of-stake networks need validator tooling and staking infrastructure. Smart accounts create work around bundlers, paymasters, wallet architecture, and transaction orchestration.

The engineering market expanded with the architecture.

Scaling Created Entire Engineering Specialties

During DeFi Summer, scaling was already a concern, but much of the activity still happened directly on Ethereum mainnet.

That changed as rollups matured.

Ethereum now describes Layer 2 rollups as a central part of its scaling strategy. Dencun introduced blobs to make rollup data cheaper, while later upgrades increased blob capacity and changed how data availability works.

That development created career paths around rollup infrastructure, sequencers, proof systems, data availability, interoperability, and Layer 2 security.

These roles require different backgrounds. Some engineers come from distributed systems, others from cryptography, compilers, cloud infrastructure, or protocol research.

A company hiring for this layer today needs much more precision than a broad search for a “blockchain developer.”

Security Became More Specialized

The security environment changed alongside the technology.

Early DeFi growth demonstrated how quickly smart contract failures could become financial losses. As protocols became more connected, security teams had to reason about interactions between contracts, governance systems, bridges, oracles, wallets, and economic incentives.

The rise of MEV added another dimension.

Ethereum notes that MEV activity grew sharply during 2021, while organizations such as Flashbots developed infrastructure around transaction ordering, block building, searchers, relays, and later validators.

That work sits somewhere between distributed systems, economics, protocol engineering, and security.

The result is a technical hiring market where “security engineer” can describe several very different careers.

Proof of Stake Changed the Infrastructure Layer

Ethereum’s 2022 Merge replaced proof-of-work mining with proof-of-stake consensus and reduced the network’s energy use by roughly 99.95%. It also changed what operating Ethereum infrastructure required.

Validators, consensus clients, execution clients, staking services, slashing protection, validator monitoring, and later MEV infrastructure became increasingly important parts of the technical ecosystem.

Shapella enabled validator withdrawals in 2023, while Pectra later increased the maximum effective validator balance from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH.

These changes created work that looked very different from the smart contract-heavy hiring market of 2020.

Infrastructure engineers could now build careers around staking systems and network operations without spending most of their time writing application contracts.

Wallet Engineering Became a Deeper Technical Field

Wallets also changed.

Earlier Web3 experiences often assumed that users would manage seed phrases, hold ETH for gas, and understand transactions well enough to navigate those systems.

Account abstraction has created a much larger engineering surface around smart accounts, recovery, sponsored transactions, transaction batching, bundlers, and paymasters.

Ethereum reports that ERC-4337 has already supported more than 26 million smart accounts and 170 million UserOperations. Pectra also introduced EIP-7702 functionality that gives externally owned accounts access to smart-contract capabilities.

Wallet development now overlaps with security engineering, protocol design, infrastructure, and user experience.

That creates another specialized hiring market.

The Engineer Has Changed With the Industry

The people building Web3 have changed too.

Electric Capital’s 2024 Developer Report found that one in three crypto developers worked across multiple chains. Developers with more than two years of crypto experience reached an all-time high and produced 70% of tracked code commits.

That matters for hiring because the industry now has a larger population of engineers who have lived through several technical cycles.

Someone who entered during DeFi Summer may have started with Solidity and moved into protocol architecture. Another may have gone from smart contract auditing into security research. A backend engineer could have moved into validator infrastructure, while a cryptography researcher may now work on proving systems.

A Web3 CV from 2020 therefore needs context when evaluated in 2026.

Hiring Needs to Understand the Timeline

Web3 recruitment becomes harder when job titles are treated as static descriptions.

The industry underneath those titles has changed quickly.

A “blockchain engineer” working during DeFi Summer may have spent most of their time building Solidity contracts and integrations. Someone using the same title today might work on execution clients, rollups, account abstraction, cryptographic proofs, or institutional settlement infrastructure.

Hiring teams need to understand what someone actually built during each stage of their career, how their technical responsibility developed, and whether their experience matches the systems the company operates today.

The history matters because it explains the candidate.

As Web3 becomes more specialized, strong hiring depends on understanding both where the technology is now and how engineers arrived there.

Who We Are

Veretin Recruitment helps Web3, AI, and fintech companies hire technical talent through focused sourcing, manual filtering, and detailed candidate evaluation.

We look beyond job titles to understand the systems candidates have worked on, how their responsibilities developed, and whether their experience matches what a team actually needs.

References

• Uniswap Labs, Uniswap V2 Mainnet Launch, May 2020.
• Compound, COMP Governance and Distribution.
• Yearn Governance, YFI Supply Proposal, July 2020.
• Ethereum.org, Ethereum Roadmap.
• Ethereum.org, Scaling Ethereum.
• Ethereum.org, Account Abstraction.
• Electric Capital, 2024 Crypto Developer Report.