It is fake in the sense that billions of dollars are being minted by crypto without any real use case other than theoretically fixing the financial system "someday". But fake stuff has always been a big part of the economy. Realtors extract 6% of most real estate transactions, but provide minimal "real" value, for example. The important thing is that inflation isn't running away and also businesses are not shutting down rapidly, causing a cascading effect of more businesses to shutdown and fire even more employees.