yeah, the blockchain companies funnel a lot of the wealth that comes in via exchange speculation to development work, but very often they are either reinventing the wheel or solving problems that don't exist
i think that the pBFT database has a lot of great use cases - and the voucher/stock like nature of the tokens they issue is really problematic, because it tends to end up being taken over by those who are corrupt and exploit people's anxiety about poverty, caused by fiat itself
definitely a big part of the problem is the VC mindset... they have fiat hoses and just try to spray that at everything and anything that might possibly become useful, and most of it is a waste