you wanna know why crypto is just speculation and gambling now? put yourself in the shoes of an actual dev who showed up to the space relatively early, say 2018-2020. consider what it feels like to be someone with an elite background putting in 60-100h weeks every week, while watching people who trade full-time out earn you on a weekly basis consider watching the other builders who take the predatory deals from VCs get rich by dumping on their community and then retiring with no consequences consider how it feels to have your treasury get destroyed by FTX or Anchor and to be left with nothing while half the people involved just walk away how many would still be left? 10%, 20%? then go through the pumpfun era. watch people who launch bundled scams calling themselves "devs" and once again, out-earning you march through multiple bear markets, do it all without rugging, and watch the protocols who fuck people over win over and over and over again deal with the fact that everyone outside of tech assumes you are the same sort of person as the people who retired off rugs, think about how it feels to be labelled a "crypto scammer" by default if you talk about your job as one of the only people trying to actually build things then, after all that, consider that a new, uber-fast moving industry full of new frontier tech shows up next door and sucks up all the VC funding would you still be in "Web3"? would you still be committed To The Vision? no, you would not. you'd either rug, or move on. and that's what everybody did.