I'm not denying that there's money in the industry - every portion of the software industry can rake cash due to the extremely high margins that software has compared to just about any other industry.

The magic is finding which subsegments might have even higher margins than others.

Crypto used to have fairly high margins, but all the easy gains have been claimed by larger firms as it's a much more mature industry now, but portions of the ML space still have much more opportunity for growth, so it makes sense to deploy capital there (this is a very high level view so take with a grain of salt - B2C and SMB B2B and Enterprise B2B have entirely different GTM motions and path to profitability).

But at least for me, I can't justify participating in a Series A round for a crypto startup compared to an MLOps startup today.