But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations.
In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool?
A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years.
Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it.
The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore.
Winter came, and it was us.