Not clear to me. A lot of technical work doesn't get invested in. I mean— sure you could get a few thousand dollars or something. Getting millions would be much more dicy, especially if you're thinking like I do and thinking that any serious altcoin competition with bitcoin could potentially be very bad for all cryptocurrencies (damaging network effect), plus competing with bitcoin is a long uphill battle. Perhaps it's arguably more profitable to do some splash where you've got effectively infinite supply, and feed a huge incoming speculative demand ripple/stellar style.

I'm probably out of my depth— figuring out how to extract money from speculators isn't something I really have experience with... it's just not so surprising to me. Though next I'd be worrying that if someone did all these dishonest things, what backdoors do they have in the software? :-/ In my case I only ran any of these codebases sandboxed on separated machines. Presumably altcoin exchanges have similar setups?