Whether or not you think it’s a fad, ChatGPT has close to 200 million users actively using their product. No crypto company was ever close to that.
Whether OpenAI’s API is a viable or risky product is a secondary and separate question. Yeah, there are a lot of wrappers out there. But that doesn’t matter with regards to the usefulness of LLMs generally.
And crypto is often searching for a use case that it can do better than other technologies. Payments for example, have advantages in crypto that the average person doesn't care about. The disadvantages however, can be killers (e.g. refunds for fraudulent transactions on your credit card has no equivalent in crypto).
The other problem with crypto's search for the killer app is that things like NFTs, which make no sense in the world of 'free' information, became ridiculously hyped and gave crypto a bad name.
Whether OpenAI’s API is a viable or risky product is a secondary and separate question. Yeah, there are a lot of wrappers out there. But that doesn’t matter with regards to the usefulness of LLMs generally.