[patio11]

Disclaimer: HN's resident cryptocurrency skeptic.

The overwhelming majority of jobs at cryptocurrency companies do not touch the underlying protocols, for the same reason that the overwhelming majority of engineers at Bank of America don't touch SWIFT every day. BoA still needs front end, back end, DevOps, mobile development, etc etc etc. (They likely have more of any one of those jobs than the entire cryptocurrency industry has engineers total.)

More broadly: seek to be defined less by the technologies you've worked with and more what you can bring to the table in terms of business value. In the future world where some programmable blockchain is as reasonable a target for programs as X86 is, the skill worth selling is not "I am capable of writing executable code" but "I am capable of writing the right executable code to unlock tremendous value for your particular business."

If you consider your career in this fashion, you will take on less idiosyncratic technical risk. I will be polite with regards to this statement in consideration that you are a real, early-career engineer: the amount of idiosyncratic technical risk one would take if one defined oneself strictly as a blockchain protocol expert is considerable.