Your example has been happening too.
This isn't just crypto, this is a fundamental strategy for most VC funds. The most valuable VC funds select portfolio companies based on whether they will succeed at selling to each other. This shows a growth multiple that is used to position the company for raising funding from the next sucker VC. That VC then "introduces" their portfolio company to their other portfolio companies, in continuum, until exit. Eventually the public market understands that the growth multiple is a house of cards and the stock tanks. But the VC is happy because they took their exit, the government is happy because these companies collectively employ hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who pay above-average tax rates, and even institutional investors are happy so long as the stocks tank individually and not in concert, making little difference to their overall portfolio. So the practice continues.
I don't see any other replies hypothesizing this in terms that rhyme with the dot com "bust" of 2000.
In late 90s, in addition to whatever product-market-fit from their "blue ocean strategies", the dot coms generally invested in and bought services from each other.
Wall St didn't look at where the dollars came from or went to the second or third step, they treated every company as if its revenue came from the customer marketplace.
Instead, a given VC dollar (or customer dollar) would get spent from that tech firm to its providers, who would give it to their providers, and then their providers, in turn. This way, the same single dollar would show up across a dozen balance sheets, each at 14x growing to 40x and eventually 100x multiples. So the 1 dollar instead of being, say, $40 of "value" for the one firm that got the dollar in from outside the ecosystem, that dollar would show up 12 x 40x or $480 of imagined uncorrelated "value".
By 1999, the public companies had caught on to where they could just give cash from public markets to dot com providers to turn around and purchase the public company's goods or services at a discount ( "strategic relationships"), with their own dollars then driving a 40x - 100x market value boost, generating more public dollars they could use to create more "customers".
Even if all these companies had legitimate products, when you looked under the hood, relatively few dollars were coming in from outside the private and public markets revenue multiple game. If some of these folks misstepped, and folks started having to unwind expected revenues, and in turn unwind their own spend, and letting the air out happens faster than they can keep their footing .... boom, you have a bust.
Today there are multiple sites tracing the actual flow of digital "currency" and seeing the same loops happening, where every agent in the loop is nominally valued as if generating revenue from outside, when instead, they're lock step in a circular flow.
Any interruption and ... dot com Y2K 2.0.
So less value destruction, more a glitch in the illusion big enough for non-experts to notice absence of outside value.