Starting from 2016 we have seen all kinds of ICO's and later IEO's related to almost any existing business. People tried to blokchenize aka cryptonize almost everything. Online shops, Banks, Insurance, Medical services, Tourism, Real estate, Social media, Cannabis e.t.c.... e.t.c.... and even prostitution, gays and lgbt.... Some of them used ERC20 tokens and smart contracts and some of them created new altcoins. 99.9% of them failed because all that businesses are already established with fixed rules and managed by specially educated employees aka qualified managers. Nor of that businesses needed so called crypnonization. Also nor of them needed a new payment instruments like bitcoin or any other altcoin. Typical example of that are some banks that tested XRP which was developed especially for them, but finally all of them refused to use it. Someone will say that some online shops, bookmakers and casinos are accepting bitcoins, but the amount of such adopters is critically low. OK, blockchain technologies are used officially in some countries like Georgia, Estonia, and few others for storing some public data and cryptocurrency is officially recognized and taxed, but others are still very suspicious towards blockhain and crypto in general. Despite all this, dozens of new, completely unknown crypto projects, with some crazy ideas are appearing on the market almost daily. (Check "Recently Added" on coinmarketcap) Why am I posting all this? Because any educated economist who will see this situation will ask a simple question: Are all crypto projects listed on coinmarketcap used for speculation purposes only ? That is my question too.
In my opinion, all investments in any form, whether stocks, gold, or crypto including bitcoin are speculations. We know that no one expected bitcoin or ethereum the price would go up because at the beginning it was created, bitcoin had no price and in my opinion because it was speculation that the price of bitcoin could reach $ 20k because there was no underlying behind bitcoin.
This also applies to stocks, when we buy shares, maybe we buy because of good financial performance, but no one is able to predict the financial sustainability will last long or not.