That's been my entrance into crypto as well. I really dislike the speculative, get-rich-quick, even casino like connotation crypto has (inevitably) acquired. It shades the incredible technology behind it.

For a couple of years I have been studying and playing around with smart contracts in my free time, getting a better understanding of this paradigm (every smart contract can be seen as a singleton object "living" in the blockchain, with functions that are like API endpoints which you can interact with in a decentralized fashion), how it shapes applications built on top of it, and the possibilities ahead of us (ex: DeFi - Decentralized Finance).

There's a lot of skepticism around crypto, like "it's a solution without a problem", but I don't buy it. Even if it were, it's a solution sophisticated, interesting enough, worth diving yourself into ;)