The falsifiable part of Chamath’s claim—that DeFi/crypto architectures would destroy a significant amount of existing financial wealth—has clearly occurred, but the broader net positive for the world judgment is subjective and not empirically resolvable.

Evidence that crypto/DeFi destroyed substantial wealth:

• The 2020–2022 crypto bubble and subsequent 2021–2024 crash wiped out large amounts of market value. The Terra/Luna algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem alone lost about $40–45 billion in market capitalization within about a week when TerraUSD depegged and LUNA collapsed from around $119 to near zero. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Terra/Luna’s broader ecosystem had grown to roughly $60 billion at peak value before becoming essentially worthless, illustrating large-scale wealth destruction for investors. (financialfright.com)
• Total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols fell from about $304 billion in December 2021 to roughly $96 billion in September 2022—a decline of ~70%, reflecting a sharp destruction of on-chain financial positions. (finbold.com)
• Centralized platforms tied into the broader crypto/DeFi ecosystem, like Celsius and FTX, also failed. Celsius managed around $25 billion in assets at its peak before freezing withdrawals and entering bankruptcy, with billions in losses tied to its token and yield strategies. (theverge.com) FTX’s collapse led to customer and investor losses estimated in the multi‑billion‑dollar range, with U.S. regulators citing at least an $8 billion customer shortfall during bankruptcy proceedings. (theguardian.com)

These events show that crypto/DeFi architectures and adjacent tokens did indeed destroy a large amount of financial wealth, consistent with the first part of Chamath’s prediction.

However, his normative claim that the overall effect on the world is positive cannot be cleanly tested:

• Assessing “net positive” requires value judgments about innovation, financial inclusion, censorship resistance, fraud, environmental impact, regulatory responses, and long‑term institutional change. Different analysts and stakeholders reach sharply different conclusions, and there is no widely accepted metric that settles this question.
• The time horizon (“over time”) is open‑ended; DeFi/crypto remains in flux, with ongoing regulatory shifts, technological upgrades, and new use cases (and failures). Any definitive evaluation of net global benefit versus harm would be premature and inherently contestable.

Because one part of the prediction (wealth destruction) is clearly borne out, while the other part (net positive for the world) is inherently subjective and not empirically decidable, the overall prediction is best categorized as ambiguous rather than strictly right or wrong.