In the rest of the software industry, there is at least a plausible resemblance to traditional economic incentives: you build software that people pay for (or otherwise extracts value from them, like adtech). The "value" of the product, company, &c. is some function of the company's financial health, public speculation, and the expected size of the market.

It's difficult to say the same for DeFi: nearly all of the products seem to be in the "Uber for Dogs" category, except that the "Uber" is an extremely slow distributed ledger with no discernible benefits. The value appears to be solely in speculation, divorced from underlying technical value.

And here's the thing: the market can speculate all it wants. But the underlying economic reality is that cryptocurrencies aren't meaningfully competing with traditional alternatives, and the market is built on that: we see ridiculous valuations for "$SERVICE but on $COIN" not because `$SERVICE` is worth that much, but because speculators are riding the speculative wave of `$COIN` and using `$SERVICE` to pump that speculation.

So an unfalsifiable and impossible separate higher standard levied exclusively at crypto when it applies to teams and products in the rest of the tech industry.

It doesn't matter that you don't like the applications? This isnt different enough from the non crypto world to support what you’re writing.