Not so long ago, the global business community was fascinated by the metaverse and the web3, the fashionable hypothesis that the next generation of the Internet would give rise to a persistent, collective virtual reality built on a blockchain-based foundation. Now a different kind of reality is setting in: Many of the high-flying concepts and companies that drove this vision have collapsed.

The outsized implosion of Crypto Exchange FTX has garnered equally outsized headlines. But the crypto crash is much bigger than FTX. More than $2 billion worth of digital currency was stolen this year, mostly from loosely regulated decentralized finance or “DeFi” startups, according to The New York Times. And after peaking in November 2021, the value of crypto assets fell by 73…