I have a strong suspicion that some of these exist as fronts to move flight capital out of China, Russia, and other places that hemorrhage dodgy money.

There almost seems to be an inverse relationship between reality and funds raised. Here's one of the very few real ones:

http://sia.tech

They got nowhere near the funding, and most of it was conventional:

http://sia.tech/funding2016/

It's one of the few coin-backed distributed things that seems like it might be useful to the point that I may actually try it, and I've heard it actually does work.

Guess that's passe in these quarters.