Yet what have any of these startups delivered other than tools for the crypto world? The whole thing seems almost 100% self-referential. It's like a financial M

Yet what have any of these startups delivered other than tools for the crypto world? The whole thing seems almost 100% self-referential. It's like a financial MMORPG. Does the crypto world have anything to offer the real world? Personally I've only seen one common use case: currency and wire transfer. As the OA correctly points out this use case is being harmed by currency hyper-deflation and fee inflation. Even the black market use case is faltering for these reasons. Few ICO projects are even usable. Most don't even exist. Of those that are usable I can off the top of my head think of only one that seems to have any utility that doesn't recurse into crypto: Siacoin. Siacoin apparently works but it's not a compelling alternative to Amazon S3 or Backblaze, so its utility is minimal at best.