I spent most of the last two years working on an NFT anti-fraud solution[0].
My two prior startups were (essentially) in telecom and healthcare. Coming from these well established, highly regulated, somewhat legacy industries to "crypto"/NFTs/web3 was a very interesting experience, to say the least. Users/potential customers for our solution ranged from creators to marketplaces to collectors/investors. Several very general and broad observations:
1) The anonymous/pseudo anonymous nature of the space is bizarre. I would have multiple voice-only meetings with people using aliases and avatars for all communications. To this day I only know some people as "Mango Man" or whatever. Meeting people who could just burn down an entire identity and start fresh when things go sideways is an indicator of the nature of the space.
2) There is a general lack of "adults in the room". I would get on a call with the Founder/CEO of a marketplace or project that was valued (at least) in the > $100m range and hear and see things that were horrifying. My final breaking point was a call with the founder of a well known highly valued NFT marketplace who showed up (Tuesday morning, 10 AM) obviously high on some sort of stimulant. Within the first five minutes of the call they repeated their mantra of "I'm just trying to get made, paid, and laid" several times. They spent the remainder of the (very brief) call describing all kinds of things I'm pretty sure are illegal. On an introductory call.
3) The fraud and overall criminality is well beyond what is publicly known from FTX, Celsius, web3 is going great, etc. The most common reply regarding our solution was along the lines of "Why would we want this? We make our money on fraud". I was frequently reminded me of the scene in The Big Short when they talk to mortgage brokers and come away saying "Why are they confessing?" with the response being "They're not confessing, they're bragging".
4) Any semblance of professionalism and basic standards is generally non-existent. A HEAD OF LEGAL for a well known exchange (Superbowl commercial) would say and post things on LinkedIn that would get you terminated immediately in any other field. Daily.
5) The more technical startups/partners (infrastructure providers, etc) were generally the best to work with. However, the profiles of the founders and team were interesting - many of them had 1-2 years of junior experience at a FAANG (for better or worse).
6) VC in the space is even more wild than what has been reported in the media. I'll just leave this one at that.
7) Many people in the space seemed to just appear from nowhere. Like some of the technical founders with 1-2 years of junior experience and SBF who had a few years doing something at Jane Street I often times couldn't figure out where these people came from or why/how they were here. Of course this is common in tech (from Google to Facebook founders often "appear out of nowhere") but it was still extremely bizarre for SBF type characters to be dealing with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of other people's money with either no reputation/background or a shady one.
8) In my 25 years of experience I've never dealt with a more generally unimpressive group of people. After nearly two years in the space, meeting hundreds of people, there are only a handful I want to maintain any sort of personal or professional relationship with.
With my background I knew I would experience some culture shock (for lack of a better term) entering a space that was still (after 14 years) the Wild West. What I experienced was (almost universally) so beyond the pale I finally ran away screaming. I spent more and more of my time and energy attempting to motivate myself and the team by focusing on our efforts to do good in the space but after all of this no amount of rationalizing could make up for the cesspool I was living in every day. Like the famous saying goes - "If you think you might be depressed, first make sure you're not just surrounded by assholes".
Basically, what I'm saying is, when I see the unbelievable-to-most FTX (and other) stories unfolding in the media all I can think is "Yep, sounds about right". When I see stories like this and people asking "What are all of these people doing?" I can firmly respond with either "I have no idea" or "Trying to manage this crazy world takes a lot of people". Thankfully I'm not in the space any longer but as shoes keep dropping left and right I don't think I could be surprised by anything anymore.
[0] - https://fnftf.io/