Crypto’s spectacle is once again loud and unruly. Argentina’s president is under investigation for promoting a token. The rapper Ye teased a memecoin widely condemned as racist, and North Koreans reportedly stole more than a billion dollars in digital assets. And this is just the past week. Hollywood screenwriters would be hard-pressed to match the antics of an industry once relegated to pariah status that is now warmly embraced by President Donald Trump.

Onlookers often see a chaotic show—politicians exploiting controversy, celebrities minting obscure tokens, and a sector seemingly lurching from one scandal to the next. But beneath the spectacle lies a community forging genuine innovations in finance, data privacy and decentralized…