Could you give some examples of the incredible work you mention? I think Solana is pretty cool, and am looking to learn more about the space.

Read about Level 2 solutions like zk snarks. It's really fascinating stuff. I enjoy the podcast called "Zero Knowledge." The last one with Professor Alessandro Chiesa is really great, but that's not the best one for beginners for sure.

Alogrand has some pretty nice tech. It feels like a v2 - instead of being held together with tape and fencing wire it's a well engineered properly thought out solution.

Things like their on-chain language not being Turing complete so they can scale it better than the Ethereum disaster.

I'll second looking into layer 2 projects.

Most of the new blockchains constantly being spun up are little more than schemes to make the founders rich. Even if the stacks are technically cleaner and nicer to work with, it's really hard to imagine any new blockchain bringing anything significant enough to the table to overcome network effects of established leaders. Specifically be wary of coins like Solana, Cardano, and maybe even Ethereum, which Gary Gensler of the SEC has indicated are probably all unregistered securities and he looks to be gearing up to come after them.

I'm in the bitcoin only, simple, rock solid foundation with complexity built in higher layers camp, so I'll mention a couple of interesting things going on.

The taproot softfork was recently approved by the network and will go live on mainnet next month. Read up here, https://blog.keys.casa/what-is-taproot-bitcoin-upgrade/.

The lightning network is starting to get some real momentum after years of development. People are using it in unexpected ways, like building an e2e encrypted chat network (https://sphinx.chat/) that piggybacks on the network, or the LNURL-auth protocol (https://xn--57h.bigsun.xyz/lnurl-auth.html) that allows websites to provide persistent user accounts that are authenticated with a user's lightning wallet and require no other personal information. There's recently been some proposals (e.g. https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf) to do some magic to stuff a truly massive amount of scaling within the limited bitcoin blocksize.

Protocol changes needed for trustless drivechains/sidechains seems to be gaining traction, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0300.mediawi.... The Rootstock sidechain will potentially bring the ethereum virtual machine to bitcoin as a sidechain.

I know Ethereum also has some interesting layer 2 work, but I'm not as familiar with what's happening since I don't personally buy into the fat, complex base layer approach, the much more centralized nature of the network and development, nor the planned transition to proof of stake.

I jumped head first into crypto about 18 months ago. You are right, there are a lot of earnest, passionate, and talented people in that space. It does feel like it's 1997 again.

crypto like coins? or something else?

Tried to soak in as much as possible ranging from buying/selling crypto, over mining, farming, and folding, and being an SPO for Cardano, to reading whitepapers and becoming a value-adding community member. I haven't tried yield farming yet.

I assume you mean crypo-coins, and not cryptography based on this comment.

Yes. Cryptography I only covered in uni, and while it's an interesting domain, its not for me.