There's a general sentiment that crypto isn't at the cutting edge anymore and working in this industry doesn't confer the same learning benefits it used to I think those people are working in the wrong niche of crypto. Crypto is still a place to be for formally verified software, zero knowledge & incentive design 1. formal verification software is big for AI as a reinforcement learning playground & as more secure code that can't be hacked by godlike LLMs. Crypto is leading the field (although we didn't invent it) because of how much safer funds can get with it. Building smart contracts in languages like lean are the frontier to be at now 2. Zero knowledge is key for enabling collaboration b/w people or entities that don't want to share their actual data. We are seeing this become more important where LLM models trained on data across corporates is better for all, but no one wants to share their actual data with competitors. improving models without revealing the data used to train it is the forefront for zk research & ai 3. Crypto is still very much one of the leaders in incentive design, internet coordination, micropayments, governance of online communities Trading, defi, prediction markets are already mainstream so i haven't touched on those, even beyond those there's still a lot here that would get smart people into our space