One thing I find interesting from this salary breakdown is that we finally have another meaningful data point on compensation within web3. The industry has always been notoriously opaque when it comes to pay, making it difficult to benchmark careers beyond anecdotal offers and CT discussions. A few observations stood out to me. Leadership roles continue to command the largest compensation packages, which honestly isn't too surprising. As the industry matures, execution alone becomes less of a differentiator. Things like strategy, product direction, capital allocation, hiring, partnerships and ecosystem building increasingly become the scarce skills that move the needle. Another point that caught my attention is on-chain engineering. The median compensation sits around $6.5k/month, broadly in line with Fullstack and Frontend engineering. That may seem counterintuitive at first given the common perception that smart contract engineers should command a substantial premium. My guess is that the market is a little more nuanced. Smart contract development is certainly one of the most specialised engineering disciplines. The code is often immutable, secures large amounts of capital & mistakes can carry permanent consequences. But the scope of the role can also be relatively focused compared to broader software engineering functions that own backend systems, infrastructure, product architecture and user-facing applications. The real premium probably exists in the long tail. Senior protocol architects, lead smart contract engineers + researchers with years of battle-tested experience likely command compensation far above the median, while the broader distribution remains closer to general software engineering. Another interesting angle is what happens over the next few years as AI adoption accelerates. While entry level roles may be drastically reduced, recent data already suggests senior engineering compensation continues trending upwards w/ software engineering salaries reportedly growing ~10–13% on average. This may just continue to skew the median + average salary benchmark. To me, that suggests companies are placing even greater value on engineers capable of making high-level architectural decisions rather than simply writing code. But ofc, while AI can increasingly generate implementations, it still struggles to replace deep protocol intuition (security judgement, systems thinking etc.) and the accumulated experience that comes from shipping production infrastructure. Perhaps the bigger question isn't whether AI will replace web3 engineers. It's whether the compensation premium gradually shifts from implementation toward judgment. And if that's the case, what skills should engineers actually be investing in over the next five years? h/t @a16z @straits_times for reference