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.

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.

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