I might sound self-important saying this (and maybe I am), but I’m probably the top crypto expert in my country, both in blockchain usage and cryptography.
Before crypto, I was one of the top people in ML/AI. I taught it at the best universities, undergrad and grad, and built real systems at the only two serious startups in the region.
It’s not so much a flex as it is a reflection of how broken education is there.

Tricks with polynomials and Riemann-Roch spaces. Breaking into the platonic realm to pillage forbidden abstractions. Starknet grantee.

could have made real dosh if you stayed in ai/ml

The nature of my work and most applied ML roles I pigeonholed myself in was what crypto pilled me. I was working on pricing models for users data and on a marketplace for that data. Most jobs I looked for were variations of this. It was fun and technically interesting but soul crushing if you looked at what the business was actually doing.