[flockonus]

On the 2nd statement, quite curious if that's true... if so, each of the companies will have at least a blog post, or tweet thread about the affiliation. If not true, you're probably reducing who is an efficient engineer who's worth their salt for their output.

[input_sh]

You're thinking of it the wrong way, think of it as a banner ad.

If your open source project has a homepage, a fair amount of visitors, and a public list of sponsors, blockchain companies will pay for the highest tier to be on top of that list instead of going down the usual AdSense route.

From their perspective it's a link from a respectable source that reaches their target audience (those into tech) on a permanent basis that even adblocks don't block. And it only costs them up to a couple of hundreds of bucks per month, way cheaper then traditional banner ads. Doesn't matter if what you're actually building has anything to with cryptocurrencies, but of course having some touching ground works even better.

[est31]

Whether this has happened for him in particular, I don't know. He at least has made a blog post with the links of the companies in it, but of course this is only indication, not proof. The trend is certainly a thing. Blockchain companies / NFT projects / etc live from attention. They need it for their growth.