One of the main determinants of a legitimate project from a ponzi scheme is the number of success stories that emerge from it. Ponzi schemes might have a few winners, and for some of the bigger projects it might have a significant number of people who emerge as winners, and many will even vouch for the legitimacy of such a project despite evidence to the contrary. Yet a truly successful project isn't determined by the number of winners, but the number of losers from the total pool of stakeholders.
It appears there must always be winners and losers even from the most sincere of projects. Some sincere projects are executed badly, while some really bad projects are executed so well at the very beginning that they might give the impression of being quite legitimate. Yet the impression that we don't necessarily need a zero sum scenario for a project to thrive has permeated present day society. It is one of the reasons why socialism has become so attractive to many young people as they feel socialism creates a situation of no losers.
A situation where everyone loses, or no one wins isn't necessarily better than a scenario where some win. It is why socialism won't fly no matter how much they try to sell it. Prosperity creates more prosperity and ideally the victory of one person should actually lead to many more victors. The current system of capitalism creates opportunities to win for the majority of people, which on its own is quite remarkable. Now crypto has also been a ball of opportunities since it launched, and with each improvement we see just how valuable some of these opportunities could potentially be.
Conclusion
The distinct difference between a crypto project and a ponzi scheme is the creation of value. Yet not all crypto projects are of value, which means some projects could actually be ponzi schemes. We must be careful to properly distinguish them even though the lines can be blurry sometimes. The crypto space of the future should actually create more winners than what many traditional systems already have on offer. We see it in projects like Hive already. Even if Hive fails (God forbid), I don't think anyone can say they were shortchanged by this project. The liberalization of value is on course to change everything.