Chad DePue, Former Snapchat Director of Engineering, Moves to Uniswap Labs

Crypto continues to attract top talent from across the traditional tech world.

Chad DePue, a former senior director of engineering at Snapchat parent company Snap Inc., announced on Wednesday that he is joining Uniswap Labs as a vice president of engineering.

DePue has been working in tech since at least 1997, including with companies such as Microsoft (MSFT) and the Whisper App. He is also a general partner at Uncommon Projects, a venture capital firm.

In a blog post, DePue cited “the endless opportunity that lies before us” in Web 3 as a motivating factor in joining the team.

“I’ve spent years building developer tools with innovators and creators and enjoy the challenge of bringing products from zero to one. Uniswap may be a household name for crypto-natives, but the broader culture is just getting to know us,” he wrote.

The hiring comes at a time when Uniswap is beginning to expand to chains and environments beyond Ethereum. Unlike SushiSwap, which has deployed to 15 different chains and layer 2 companion systems, Uniswap has only deployed to Optimism, Arbitrum and, as of December 2021, Polygon.

Read more: Uniswap Launches on Polygon, Driving MATIC to All-Time Highs

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange by volume with a 35% cross-chain market share, according to CoinGecko data, though it trails Curve Finance in terms of total value locked ($7.5 billion vs. Curve’s $17.7 billion).

Uniswap Labs, the development entity behind Uniswap, is among the many crypto and Web 3 companies aggressively hiring. The team’s hiring page currently has openings for 17 positions, and has 53 employees listed on LinkedIn. In October, the team brought on Hari Sevugan – who had worked on the presidential campaigns of then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama and current Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigeig – to lead their communications efforts.

Polygon, Dapper Labs and Aave join Uniswap Labs as organizations that have poached legacy tech talent in recent weeks – part of a trend many observers have dubbed a “brain drain” from Web 2 to Web 3.

Read more: Plenty of Money and No One to Pay: Crypto Teams at ETHDenver Face Hiring Crunch

Indeed, the crypto hiring market is perhaps more competitive than ever.

Last month, Coinbase (COIN) announced plans to hire 2,000 new employees in 2022. In January, Alphabet (GOOG) subsidiary Google released an official blog post in which it said it was hiring a team of blockchain experts for its Cloud division.