I get the point and I can understand how it can feel like that from the outside. But the same people that are saying that FTX is not crypto now, were saying it

I get the point and I can understand how it can feel like that from the outside. But the same people that are saying that FTX is not crypto now, were saying it before and same applies to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance... Luna and Terra were crypto, though, economically unsound design with Ponzi economics but crypto. And the litmus test is actually super simple and foolproof. Does whatever you are doing settle a transaction in a public, tamper-resistant ledger that is cryptographically verifiable? FTX business and operations does not involve such a thing. It's a traditional corporation, established in the Bahamas, running some SQL/noSQL DB or perhaps more likely paper napkins as a system of record... And as such was vulnerable to the same kind of abuses that have plagued financial fraud forever. Here is actual projects that are implemented in a blockchain: - A exchange, e.g. Uniswap: https://uniswap.org/ https://uniswap.org/ Here is a smart contract that executes its transactions: https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c7bd8665fc45 https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c... You can see the transactions live. You can see the code that runs this exchange: https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c7bd8665fc45#code https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c... - Lending and borrowing, e.g. Aave: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ - Decentralized staking, e.g. RocketPool: https://rocketpool.net https://rocketpool.net ... Nothing of this has failed. It's working 24/7 without maintenance windows. Everything is on-chain, publicly verifiable, automated and involves no humans.