There needs to be a differentiation between good and bad actors in this drama as opposed to the lazy and inaccurate idea of "the crypto grift".
These recent billion-dollar grifts plaguing crypto have primarily been enabled by actors working steadfastly against all of crypto's core principles: decentralisation, secure your own money, no middle-man.
These players are employing all of the same tactics enabled by the traditional financial system to carry out these scams: centralisation, entrust someone else to secure your money, employ a middle-man.
It's still legitimate to criticise crypto, there are many issues there: projects that fall short of the goal of the decentralisation, someone securing their own money can end just as badly as entrusting someone not worthy of it, etc.
But lumping these recent events, of someone foreign to the crypto community coming in and actually setting out to defraud people outright, by lying to them about what they're doing, and twisting the ideals of crypto into nothingness, aided notably in the FTX case by continual mainstream media hype - this is a scam in an of itself plain and simple. Crypto was used as a buzzword to sucker people in - in the very negative sense of being used. Crypto wasn't the cause here.
How many billions would have been lost of FTX's customers money had SBF and FTX not been endlessly paraded over the mainstream news, and cover-pages of major financial, news and culture publications since it began?
It is those colossal failures of journalism, and/or conflicts of interest, that need to have a light shone on them, investigated and mitigated/regulated better.
Labelling this "the crypto grift", is actually continuing the grift to an unfair even worse conclusion - blaming crypto not for something done by it, but for something done to it.