A new report from the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA) estimates the crypto industry directly employs 34,000 Americans and adds more than $55 billion to U.S. GDP in 2026. Including ripple effects, it supports 232,000 jobs total.
The report, titled "Crypto at Work," was produced by analytics firm Pragmatic Policy Group (PPG), commissioned and funded by the NCA, a nonprofit focused on making crypto more accessible to American consumers. The findings arrive as the regulatory debate over digital assets continues in full swing in Washington, with the industry keen to make its economic footprint visible to lawmakers.
According to the report, crypto companies directly employ 34,000 people in the U.S. The largest single category is software, blockchain and data engineering with 10,100 roles, followed by compliance, finance and business operations with 5,450 roles and management with 5,100 roles. Adding supplier industries and spending from workers' wages, PPG arrives at a total of 232,000 jobs the crypto industry supports in the U.S. economy — 75,000 at suppliers and 123,000 through what the report calls induced effects of workers' spending.
PPG's chief economist Oliver Browne says in the report that each direct crypto job generates roughly six additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, and that the industry is establishing itself as a measurable contributor with room to grow as crypto adoption increases.
The report estimates the average wage across the 232,000 jobs it links to the industry at $133,000 a year — more than double the U.S. national median wage of $64,000. The figure covers all these jobs combined, not crypto companies' own employees specifically — a distinction PPG itself notes in a footnote to the chart. Of the $55 billion in total economic contribution, roughly $31 billion is estimated to flow to workers as wages and income.
PPG built the estimate on input-output tables from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), using an estimated U.S. crypto revenue figure of $23.22 billion sourced from Statista as its starting point. Since the crypto industry isn't a standalone category in the BEA framework, PPG mapped crypto companies to existing sectors — including securities and commodity contracts, credit intermediation, and data processing and internet publishing. The report itself notes that the occupational breakdown is a modeling assumption rather than observed, actual workforce data, since no dedicated mapping of the crypto industry's workforce exists.
California and New York alone account for more than 111,000 of the jobs the report links to the industry, while Texas follows with 26,536, Washington with 15,097 and North Carolina with 9,524. The twelve states PPG defines as "Heartland" account for around 17,000 jobs combined — less than a third of California's figure. The report highlights individual states such as Colorado, with 5,797 jobs and $1.3 billion in economic contribution, and North Dakota, with 813 jobs and $154 million, tied in part to Atlas Power's planned data center and the state bank's plans for a dollar-pegged stablecoin with Fiserv.
Stu Alderoty, president of the NCA and Ripple's chief legal officer, says the report shows the industry has become an economic driver with a real, positive impact on American jobs, wages and economic growth.
Sources: Business Wire, National Cryptocurrency Association, The Block
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