Bitcoin was designed to be a replacement for real life cash, but it ultimately failed in this role. Nonetheless it was a great experiment that essentially invented the industry.

Most cryptocurrencies, if we go only by their number, are designed to make their creators rich and moderately succeed at that. This is your ERC20s, pump dot fun, et cetera.

If we only consider ones that have any serious chance of being usable as actual currencies, these days they're usually designed to run arbitrary money-like programs known as "smart contracts", of which traditional money is just one.

Money can't be sent until it's generated, that's the same whether you're talking bitcoin or dollars. There's always a rule for who gets the new money when it's created, and somehow the rule always ends up being "rich people get the new money". Dollars go to politicians and big bankers, bitcoins go to big compute farms, ethers go to big bankers, monero goes to big compute farms. The aforementioned get-rich-quick currencies go to their creators, if course.