i was not burned by crypto, the earth is, from all the hot air. "crypto" is not the things you advertised. if your project does what you now elaborated, it is not crypto in my opinion.
and no, your system does not need a blockchain. a distributed ledger need not be a blockchain, it is just so prevalent to use that thing for that application. those byzantine generals sure would not have used a blockchain to agree on strategy. smarter people than me phrased it very good: a blockchain is a solution seeking a problem and not the solution for an existing problem.
if new nodes come into the system by installing the app and if worth comes into system by using the app, and worth comes out of the system by a real money exchange, your system will be abused and crippled, once it has enough worth for anyone to care to do so.
if worth only comes into the system by buying in, it goes the way of all the other crypto scams you lament about. it is a pyramid. first buyers make profit, late buyers have worthless bits when the exchange rate drops to nil. or many first buyers also are left with nothing as seen so often.
you need an authority to regulate money. if your authority is decentralized, that costs effort. a lot of it. if it would not cost effort, it could be easily exploited. for example by the so called 51% attack. or just by "mining" a lot of "worth" and cashing out with real money. "mining" in your system consists of agreeing on the transactions or something like that. so what hinders bad agents to just do random transactions they approve in their subset of owned nodes to create "worth" and cash out later? they would just make sure somehow that other nodes would be unreachable, so their running in circles gives them profit and not the other nodes of real people. and how would you battle such exploits? you either cannot do so because it is decentralized or you can fight it, proving the system is actually not dezentralized and making the blockchain a farce.
when it comes to money, the scammers and exploiters know no boundaries and their imagination and creativity will baffle anyone designing a "fool proof" system. money in any form is something you need to have trust in. and there is absolutely no "crypto" currency that has trust. it just is too volatile. your 1 coin might be worth half or double the next day. it is useless for paying. but it is usefull for doing trades on exchanges and making money from investors hoping to increase their money.