In my experience, there really hasn't been that significant of a flood of money in this space for several years now, or at least not to the level I've seen based on discussion here on HN.
I think HN tends to skew towards conversations around models for some reason, but almost all my peers are either funding or working on either tooling or ML driven applications since 2021.
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I've found HN to have a horrible noise to value signal nowadays, and people with experience (eg. My friends in the YC community) deviating towards Bookface or in person meetups instead now.
There was a flood of new accounts in the 2020-22 period (my hunch is it's LessWrong, SSC, and Reddit driven based on the inside jokes and posts I've been seeing recently on HN) but they don't reflect the actual reality of the industry.
Story of my life.
I have a severe HN addiction that I haven't been able to shake off.
Deep down I fundamentally believe it's a solution searching for a problem. That said, if people want to put money into it, who am I to judge.
That said, IMO crypto as a growth story is largely done. Now that Coinbase has IPOed and the industry consolidated or wiped out (eg. Kraken, FTX, OpenSea), it's not as attractive an industry anymore unless some actual fundamental problems are found that can't be remediated by existing financial infrastructure (legal and illegal).
This is plain hystronics, but regulation is absolutely coming and will only help the larger existing players to consolidate.
Coinbase, FTX, etc have all seen the writing on the wall and are working with regulators on this.
The Wild West days are definetly over now.
If I'd invest in the space, I'd probably look at KYC and AML product opportunties such as Chainalysis, but even that space has consolidated
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.
Not wanting to be part of that is just having some morals. Grabbing money where you can isn't a sign of a successful life.
There are definitely still homeopathic treatments that work, but have not received the investment necessary to go through clinical trials (or haven’t caught on due to lack of recognition from insurance companies).