The problem is that you are conflating the users with the owners. You can own cryptocurrency on an exchange or make a couple transactions to hold your funds in

The problem is that you are conflating the users with the owners. You can own cryptocurrency on an exchange or make a couple transactions to hold your funds in a wallet, but that is not really being a user. Users use cryptocurrency for real transactions and ultimately derive actual economic value from the convenience of the network. If a cryptocurrency has a lot of users, the price will be more stable and the fee model will hold up in the long term. Users do not necessarily have a lot of funds. Owners only get value by on-boarding more owners, so they can sell and stop being owners, which is ultimately zero-sum (actually less than zero-sum because someone has to pay the miners). The problem with pretty much every cryptocurrency that exists is that there are more owners than users, and the owners have more power than users. But the long-term success of the system relies on users.