crypto

At this stage I now believe crypto was planted to topple corrupt governments. 

This is the most likely scenario.

One often the most interesting ideas that came up during the ICO boom in 2017 was the idea that independence movements could be crowdfunded using ERC-20 tokens and later use the tokens as the currency in their new economy post-independence. (E.g. the Catalans in Spain)

So as an ICO participant - you could have a direct economic return if the independence movement was successful and the new country stabilized

This never played out but still an interesting idea