The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
It's a pretty self-contained bubble of geeks building things for other geeks. Which isn't not interesting! But the expectations set by the cryptonauts was that this was all going to change the world.
And then ran face first into the reasons the existing systems work the way that they do, haven't communicated well to "average" people, can't tell a non-theoretical/ideological story of why what they build exists, etc.
There are some great people working on crypto projects, but I wouldn't say it is thriving. The only mainstream company is Coinbase and they make money based on trading, not any underlying tangible value of the coins.
So what?
"omg this ycombinator founder didn't change the world" said nobody ever
But mention crypto one time.... I guess it is nice that it is held up to a separate higher standard and captivates the minds of some people willing to help it get there.
Some people here mentioned a standard about merchant adoption, even to that, so what? thats the least interesting use case, the M0 money supply is small in exchange systems people choose to respect, its panned out the same way in crypto but people decide to make a separate standard of "hey a lot of this is used for speculation! I don't consider that a use case, is it because I'm ignorant of how fiat currencies work, no, can't be".
There are various services for merchants that shield the merchant from knowing crypto is being used, and various services for consumers (like debit cards) that shield them from needing to directly use crypto. That exists, not a lot of fanfare is needed, if you want to use that you can and don't need to write a whole blog post about it. Its not an interesting use case, no matter how much you felt you needed to quantify its use in that way in order to feel better about it.
It also works, shrug, onchain (+tx eventually settled onchain) transaction volume is at all time highs and it doesn't even make international news because its not news, as it should be.
One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".
They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.
Does this mean you can only make real money if you got in at the very beginning?