The basic "cryptocurrency" economy is, at heart, only zero-sum or deeply negative-sum financial instruments. A zero-sum instrument means for every winner there is an equal loser, while negative sum means you have lots more losers than winners.

Now there are roles for 0-sum instruments: its called insurance. When you buy insurance you are expecting to lose money, but you are also expecting to not lose a LOT of money, it is a way of mitigating tail risk. Futures can be such instruments, e.g. with an airline hedging

But as soon as you have a financial instrument that is 0-sum but BOTH parties want to make a profit you have a sucker's game: one of the two parties is going to lose. So why are they so common?

Its because they are easy to create. You can create as many 0-sum or negative-sum instruments as there are suckers willing to play each side. Even better is if both sides can "book" a profit temporarily, so the employees on both sides can get their bonuses. This was 2008.

The cryptocurrency space is the same way. There is 0 actual innovation and 0 actual value created because everything is 0 sum or negative-sum. I think the biggest difference is the cryptocurrency space is slightly more honest: there are far more just explicit scams.