Zcash and many other cryptocurrency-related projects. The amount of cryptographers working on zero-knowledge proofs probably multiplied 10x thanks to cryptocurrencies.

It's a little bit funny to me. I can understand a response of "Hmm, while your application of cryptography may have some legitimate uses, in practice it seems like it's largely used for crime and scams." But I wonder what they thought the primary application of cryptography was going to me! Privacy-preserving technologies that allow you to hide from the government are necessarily going to be useful to criminals. But that's the price of freedom, no?

(I guess to be fair, some cryptographers might be interested in things like privacy-preserving voting, which wouldn't ever be useful to criminals.)