Remote work promised a lot. What it delivered, for most companies, was a more complicated version of the same problems they already had just spread across more time zones and communicated via Slack at odd hours.
Coinspaid’s Chief Human Resources Officer Alexandra Kuzminova has spent the better part of last year thinking about why distributed organisations fail, and what it takes to build one that does not. Her answer is less philosophical than most people expect.
“Culture is not a feeling,” she says. “It is a system. And like any system, it either works or it doesn’t.”
The problem nobody talks about
The standard narrative around remote work has two acts.
Act one: the pandemic forces companies to go remote. Act two: companies discover they prefer it, talent pools expand, everyone wins.
What the narrative skips is the third act: the one that happens eighteen months in, when the initial adrenaline of a new operating model has worn off and the structural weaknesses begin to surface.
At Coinspaid, a blockchain payments infrastructure company that has operated across multiple regions since its founding, that reckoning came in 2022. The company was growing. Delivery was on track. By most conventional measures, things were working.
But decisions were being made in small groups and communicated late. New hires were spending their first weeks mapping the organisation rather than contributing to it. Teams in different regions were operating with subtly different interpretations of the same priorities.
“We were not misaligned in ways that showed up on a dashboard,” Kuzminova recalls. “We were misaligned in the ways that compound quietly, until they don’t.”
The response was not a culture initiative. It was a systems rebuild.
Engineering alignment
Coinspaid employs more than 350 people across multiple regions. Nobody shares a building. The company processes billions in transaction volume annually and operates in a regulatory environment that shifts with little warning.
In that context, the luxury of informal alignment, the kind that happens naturally in offices, over lunch, in corridors, does not exist. Every mechanism for shared understanding has to be designed deliberately.
“In a distributed team, unclear ownership or fragmented communication doesn’t stay contained,” Kuzminova says. “It spreads. And in blockchain payments, the cost of that spread is not abstract.”
The company’s response has been to build people infrastructure with the same intentionality it applies to technical infrastructure. Documented decisions. Defined ownership. Monthly company-wide updates. Quarterly strategic reviews. Regular cross-functional communication. Individual development plans. Skills matrices. Structured onboarding that aims for effectiveness within 30 days, not just a comfortable first week.
None of these practices are novel. What is less common is the discipline with which they are applied - consistently, across regions, and regardless of whether business conditions are favourable.
What the numbers reveal
Retention in blockchain is structurally difficult. The competition for technical talent is global, the optionality facing skilled engineers is significant, and the industry’s volatility creates constant pressure on teams and on the organisations that employ them.
Against that backdrop, Coinspaid’s internal metrics tell an unusual story. Average employee tenure has increased year-on-year since 2022. More than 40% of senior roles filled in the past 18 months went to internal candidates. Voluntary attrition among engineers, historically the hardest cohort to retain in any technology company, sits below the industry average.
These figures do not emerge from a strong employer brand or a generous benefits package alone. They reflect, Kuzminova argues, the cumulative effect of people systems that function consistently over time.
“You can’t retain people with perks in a downturn,” she says. “What keeps people is knowing what they own, seeing a path forward, and trusting that the organisation will be honest with them when things are difficult.”
Hiring for a market that doesn’t follow normal rules
The blockchain talent market operates by different logic than most industries. The people with the deepest expertise are often not findable through conventional channels. They evaluate prospective employers not through Glassdoor reviews but through the technical quality of public repositories, the company’s on-chain track record, and the reputation of the engineering team.
Traditional hiring frameworks, built for traditional talent markets, miss most of them.
Coinspaid has adapted its approach accordingly, prioritising intellectual curiosity and technical drive over conventional credentials, and building evaluation processes capable of identifying people who have developed genuine expertise outside formal institutional structures.
“The prerequisite for working in blockchain is not a CV,” Kuzminova says. “It is a genuine drive to understand how the technology works and where it is going. That is harder to screen for, but it is the quality that actually predicts performance.”
Blockchain is a cyclical industry. The bull markets are well documented. The bear markets are where organisational culture is actually tested.
When external conditions deteriorate, token prices fall, deal flow slows, regulatory pressure increases, the informal mechanisms that hold teams together in good times tend to dissolve. What remains is structure: clear reporting lines, honest communication from leadership, and feedback systems that function regardless of market conditions.
“The question a bear market asks of a people's organisation is a simple one,” Kuzminova says. “Do your systems work when the conditions are against you? Or were they only working because conditions were favourable?”
At Coinspaid, the answer has been tested. The company has navigated multiple market cycles since its founding. The people practices that exist today were, in part, designed in response to what those cycles revealed.
The voice the org chart doesn’t show
Organisational culture is not what leadership says it is. It is what someone three years into the company tells a friend when asked whether they would recommend working there. At Coinspaid, that sentiment is reflected in a strong eNPS score of +47.8, with nearly 60% of employees acting as promoters and employee advocacy improving by 13.6 points year over year.
Tom Gasaner, an engineering manager who joined Coinspaid remotely in 2025, describes his experience with a specificity that tends to distinguish companies where people systems actually work from those where they do not.
“What surprised me was how quickly I knew what was expected,” he says. “I had worked at companies where you spent months figuring out the unwritten rules. Here, the written rules matched how things worked in practice. That sounds like a low bar. In most companies, it isn’t.”
The gap between stated culture and lived experience is where most distributed organisations lose people. Closing it is not a communications exercise. It requires systems that behave consistently whether or not leadership is watching.
On getting people in a room
Coinspaid is remote-first. It is not remote-only.
Twice a year, teams convene in person. Not for team-building exercises, but for working sessions designed to address the category of problems that asynchronous communication handles poorly: strategic disagreement, trust calibration, the kind of creative problem-solving that requires people to think together in real time.
“There is a quality of conversation that happens when people are in the same room that is genuinely difficult to replicate digitally,” Kuzminova says. “We do not use that as an argument against remote work. We use it as an argument for being deliberate about when physical presence is worth the investment.”
The two models are not in competition. In a well-designed distributed organisation, they are complementary, each doing the work the other cannot.
The larger argument
Blockchain’s decentralised architecture aligns naturally with globally distributed teams. The industry draws talent from every region, operates across every time zone, and functions in a regulatory environment that varies by jurisdiction. Remote first is not a lifestyle choice for most blockchain companies. It is an operational necessity.
The question is whether the people systems can match the ambition of the product systems.
At Coinspaid, Kuzminova’s argument is that they must and that treating them as secondary to technical infrastructure is a category error that eventually becomes visible in the numbers.
“Culture is not what happens between the real work,” she says. “It is what makes the real work possible. And in a distributed company, it either works by design or it doesn’t work at all.”
