I wonder if you're aware of what stable-coins are?
TO my knowledge, they are coins on exchanges used to tie the value of national fiat currencies. Coinbase has USDC for the US dollar, and others for Euro, British Pound Sterling etc.
There has been data that indicates that these stable coins such as I think it was Tether? Are actually not backed up by anything, and can be as much of a risk if not more than the cryptos themselves.

If I'm wrong here, someone please let me know.

The crypto that I can say with some surety that has value is Bitcoin. Because it has mindshare/confidence(much like any fiat), but also because the concept/tech alone has built a worldwide decentralized network capable of transferring, recording/validating, and even "minting" the coins.
It's like a bank, but without a central owner and without the possibility of overprinting/minting.
I also hold ETH and Cardano, but my investment into those was based on their utility and amount of developers working on technology that utilizes their functionality.
But specifically with ETH, the entire network or most of it runs on AWS(Amazon Web Services) meaning it can end with the flip of a switch. Also there's been cases where the devs have gone into the code to remove or change coins.