It sounds more rational than that. Blockchain announcements make headlines. And blockchain headlines are driving stock prices [1]. There are numpties in the mix, but I don't think it's them.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-cr...
One of my previous companies, we had people working on 'far reaching ML and AI stuff'. What they were actually doing was calculating euclidean distance between users to build a recommendation engine. Data size was around 100-150 items but every user had access to max 20 items. Questions about - Do we really need a complete recommendation system to select from 20 items? Fell on deaf years.
Great press for the manager and IT gets to show off something new.
The problem with this kind of cryptocurrency hype is that Average Joe is putting money into bitcoin because "I read DBS is using blockchain so bitcoin will go up".
Friend runs settlement infrastructure for a large bank. It's not sexy work. He has to fight for his budget. His TL; DR with a lot of this is it has made getting necessary infrastructure upgrade approvals easier.
Been needing to unify wire confirmations with some esoteric trade settlement system? Talk about Ripple. Adding real-time functionality to a net settlement system? It's a "distributed ledger". Boss gets a press release and maybe a glowing write-up, IT gets its kit.