Worked on one blockchain for years — now every job wants multi-chain skills. How are people handling this?

I am part of interview panels for Ethereum and L2 roles, and I’ll be honest — when we write “multi-chain experience,” we’re usually reacting to past hiring pain, not asking for perfection.

What actually worries us is when someone is deep in one ecosystem and assumes the same mental model applies everywhere. That’s where projects get burned. For example, I’ve seen very strong Solana developers struggle initially on Ethereum because they underestimate things like gas griefing, execution ordering, or how much surface area external calls introduce. That’s not a skill issue — it’s an assumption issue.

In interviews, the candidates who do well aren’t the ones who say “I know Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum.” They’re the ones who can say: “On Solana, I rely on parallel execution and account constraints. On Ethereum, I slow down and think about gas, reentrancy, and composability risks.”

That tells us you adapt your thinking, not just your syntax.

If you’re Solana-first, don’t hide it. Add one serious Ethereum project, deploy it, break it, debug it, and understand why things feel harder or slower. Then talk about those differences honestly. That matters more to us than a checklist of chains.

I was Solana-only for a bit over three years, working on real programs, not tutorials. When the market shifted, I panicked a little and tried to “go multi-chain” all at once — Ethereum, some L2s, even a bit of Cosmos. That was a bad move.

Nothing stuck properly. I could deploy things, but I didn’t trust my own understanding. Interviews exposed that very quickly.

What finally worked was slowing down and making a clear decision: Ethereum would be my second chain, not my replacement. I stopped comparing everything to Solana and instead tried to understand why Ethereum forces different discipline. Gas costs made me think twice. Solidity’s footguns forced me to read audits more carefully. Tooling felt slower, but I learned why teams rely on it.

In interviews, I stopped saying “I’m multi-chain.” I said: “My production experience is Solana. Over the last X months, I’ve been deliberately moving one layer deeper into Ethereum.”

That honesty actually helped. Recruiters trusted me more, and technical interviews became real conversations instead of defensive questioning. The switch wasn’t about learning more chains — it was about earning confidence in one more ecosystem.

From Cosmos side, we don’t expect Ethereum depth at all.

What matters more is whether you understand:

where trust assumptions change

how upgrades work

how cross-chain failures happen

If you can explain why something safe on Solana isn’t safe on Ethereum (or Cosmos), that already puts you above average.

This question keeps resurfacing in different forms, especially from developers who’ve spent years going deep on one ecosystem.

What seems to have changed isn’t the value of specialization, but how hiring expectations are written down. Job descriptions often collapse everything into “multi-chain”, even when interviews are actually testing something narrower — whether your reasoning still holds when the environment changes.

Across AOB discussions and interview experiences shared here, a pattern shows up repeatedly: developers who can clearly articulate one system they’ve shipped and how the same design problem behaves differently elsewhere tend to move forward more consistently than those trying to signal surface-level breadth.

That context connects closely with a few broader threads people revisit when preparing for senior roles:

Smart Contract Developer Career Hub 

https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/smart-contract-developer-career-hub

How to explain smart contract architecture decisions without sounding vague https://artofblockchain.club/article/how-to-explain-your-smart-contract-architecture-decisions-without-sounding-vague-or

Recommended resources for full-stack blockchain developer skills

  https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/recommended-resources-for-full-stack-blockchain-developer-skills

Replies here tend to be most useful when they include specifics — which chain you’ve worked on, what kind of role you’re interviewing for, and where the uncertainty actually shows up.

Noticing a pattern: people read “multi-chain required” and instantly feel disqualified. Reality is messier. Some JDs genuinely need cross-chain context, but many are written by copying “nice-to-have” bullets from other listings. What hiring teams often want is confidence that you can move across environments without breaking safety thinking. 

If you want to see the patterns we’ve collected from hiring discussions + what tends to work in interviews, these hubs are worth it: 

https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/web3-hiring-signals

https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/hiring-managers-recruiters-hub-hiring-signals-interview-expectations