Icebreaker, an open professional network co-founded by Coinbase and Google veterans, has raised $5 million in a seed round to build the blockchain’s version of LinkedIn.

Dan Stone and Jack Dillé, co-founders of Icebreaker, announced they secured the funding in a round led crypto-native investment firm CoinFund.

Icebreaker will use the funds to assemble a world-class team as it continues its mission to launch a platform that allows for professional connections on the blockchain.

Professional networking platform on the blockchain

According to the announcement, Icebreaker targets a professional network where users can benefit from “cryptographically verifiable identity” in a market that’s increasingly impacted by artificial intelligence related noise and “fake personas.”

Icebreaker will help recruiters find the best, high-quality talents, while users can tap into top opportunities as the existing platforms are often laden with engagement driven profiles.

“The world runs on trust,” Icebreaker co-founder Dan Stone, said in a press release. “Until now, it’s been impossible to see because our existing networks optimize for engagement over signal. Yet every leader knows the loudest or most followed person is rarely the best. Icebreaker lets you see who your close network trusts so you can cut through the noise to surface the talent and opportunities that are quiet, yet exceptional.”

Stone and Dillé both worked at Google before joining crypto exchange Coinbase and left in 2023 to co-found Icebreaker.

Pilots for Icebreaker have included engagements with Coinbase, Opensea, and Polygon Labs. Users can create profiles on the platfom from existing identities across one or more of LinkedIn, X, GitHub, and Farcaster among others.

The platform’s seed round also attracted investment from venture capital firms Accomplice, Anagram, and Legion Capital. Over 30 founder angels also backed Icebreaker’s funding round.

Employment-oriented online service platform, LinkedIn has now reported that there is an incredibly high demand for employees with experience in crypto.

According to an October 27 report from the platform’s editor Devin Banerjee, data from the Economic Graph team of LinkedIn shows that job postings in the United States which included keywords like “crypto” and “blockchain” went 615% up from what it was in August 2020. The data also indicates that although, many jobs of those jobs came from companies who are already crypto-oriented, or blockchain-related, however, traditional financial institution JPMorgan was one of the top employers for job postings within the digital asset world.

In addition, LinkedIn team said that there’s an expectation for financial services firms to hire even more than three times as many staff who have digital assets exposure, than in 2015.

As at July, job postings by JPMorgan included positions focusing on its efforts in global blockchain development, blockchain-focused software developers, engineers, auditors, as well as marketers. At a time, LinkedIn posted over 30 vacancies for its operations in the U.S. within a single week.

According to Roman Regelman of the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon), opportunities in digital assets are quite vast, and now, talents can be attractes in many different ways.

Meanwhile, many other major companies that are not exactly linked with crypto or finance have also posted jobs related to the crypto industry. Back in February, major online retailer Amazon announced that it was seeking a software development manager in Mexico to help with the launch of a new payment product. Also in May, Apple said it preferred someone with experience in “alternative payment providers” — including cryptocurrency — for the position of business development manager.

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