[tavavex]

The "metaverse" and a lot of cryptocurrencies were always explicit grifts with the purpose of making money for someone. Metaverse (specifically, Meta's vision of one) relied on them making meaningless digital accessories and other digital goods and selling them to people under the guise of "paying the creators". Lots of crypto doesn't exist for any reason but to be hooks for gullible people to invest in them in hopes that others will buy the crypto as well. There is a small slither of uses where some cryptocurrencies can be kinda useful, but that's basically nonexistant nowadays under the mountain of scams.

Basically - the things you brought up were largely spawned from existing technologies and have very dubious use cases outside of extracting money. AI is neither - it's obviously not a monetary scam as a category, and it has lots of uses by itself.