Blockchain, VR, Bitcoin, AI are the buzzwords that bring you $$$. Businesses will throw money at you just for using AI/ML, blockchain, even if these use cases can be solved with a few if/else or fuzzy logic or distributed NoSQL database.
No kidding, this also works in large organizations when teams/departments want to increase their budget. Create a project using some buzzword tech, or say you will integrate it in an existing project, and the people with their fingers on the money trigger are much easier to convince. Even if it makes no sense or adds no real value, it can gain you significant budget room to make other changes you want or need to do, and the higher ups get to brag about how they are implementing blockchains everywhere..
Because people are crazy about icos right now. Just in the last week, Crypterium has raised $45M, EOS has raised several bilions etc.
There are around 1 million people who are big into altcoins that are constantly ogling icos to get in early for the cryptocurrency to go 100x or 1000x.
Telegram has added in client payments a while ago. Their app/bot platform is crazily amazing. Plus a lot of the most popular bots also send out cash to users, which right now works with a rather complicated third party Bitcoin bot, but then could be done internally.