I'm not sure that the statements that a) there are bad actors in the space, and b) there will be a crash, are particularly insightful here. Both of these were predicted/expected by many, including many crypto supporters.
The key question is whether crypto will rebound. I would expect it to, particularly as governments move more into digital currencies.
Especially since this wasn't a failure of "crypto" or anything decentralized actually built on it. It was a failure by a Wall Street trader who set up a centralized exchange in the Bahamas, and engaged in the sort of shenanigans that we've seen other Wall Street people do. Apparently everybody's forgotten that legacy finance had Madoff, all sorts of shady nonsense that collapsed in 2008, etc.
The point of crypto is to eliminate such attacks by removing the need to trust central actors like SBF and FTX. It's the reason people keep talking about "trustlessness."
This is not a panacea, and building reliable smart contracts is an ongoing technical challenge with its own social issues. To really work, users need to insist on solid audits and minimal special access for admins, just for starters. But those are different problems that had nothing to do with FTX.
The point of crypto is speculation and has been for some time. If you're buying it with fiat and then selling it for fiat you're always going to be subject to unregulated exchanges. No one is using this stuff as currency. There's no "legacy finance" if 100% of your transactions are on it. You're not living in the future, you've been in the present this whole time
The point of a lot of legacy finance is speculation. We could argue about whether that's a good thing, but it's not unique to crypto.
But Ethereum and probably other smart contract blockchains have decentralized exchanges, where you can trade tokens around without trusting anyone to hold them for you. That stuff is working just fine.
Obviously we do need legacy systems to trade with fiat. But we don't need to trust those system to hold crypto for any longer than it takes to make that trade. "Not your keys, not your coins" has been a rallying cry of the crypto community ever since Mt. Gox failed eight years ago, but the big brains running hedge funds don't think that way.
It's amazing how much magical thinking pervades the space. Why would governments moving "more" into digital currencies do anything for crypto? They'd be completely unrelated.
It will when it actually start delivering value. It might be cross national digital money or somekind nft Ticketmaster competitor or some kinda cross game NFT items.
The key question is whether crypto will rebound. I would expect it to, particularly as governments move more into digital currencies.