"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most.
Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
Look man, cryptocurrency isn't some kind of pyramid scheme! It's just a bisected cube!