Also, the chain won't have to be a store of value. Instead the value will be real assets represented as "tokens".
The asset can be anything. Stock, royalty rights, water rights, futures, commodities, etc.
The ledger would then act as an exchange/settlement layer that can match trades. Merchant denominates prices in shares of GOOG, customer pays with AAPL.
It seems like currency is largely helpful for providing liquidity for trades. It's hard to trade goats for camels if the other person doesn't want goats. The ledger I believe can help get around that.
It's NFT market for asset ownership (mainly artwork right now) is huge, there was literally a Christie's auction for an NFT token (and the art it represents) this week.
There aren't official stocks/commodities yet (I think) but a bunch of sythetic derivatives already. A couple of banks have even done test runs of bond issuance.
ETH itself is does have "store of value" qualities in background, but a trick was developed of using it as collateral to back on-chain stablecoins like DAI. That allows on-chain token markets/contracts to rely on USD-valuations for liquidity and baseline reference, independent of general "crypto" speculative fluctuations.
There's also Earnst & Young's "Nightfall" project that trying to bring b2b accounting on-chain using Eth's zero knowledge tools to retain privacy.
It's utterly failed at that, because nobody actually cares about it as a payments system. People care about it as a speculative investment.
The more people care about it as a speculative investment, the worse it gets at being a payments system. We're seeing this today, as the costs of using bitcoin skyrocket, and the overwhelming majority of bitcoin transactions are sending it to and from fiat-to-bitcoin exchanges.
The lack of vision panned out. Bitcoin is not a good currency, it is not bringing us into a decentralized land of milk and honey, it is environmentally ruinous, and all that it has accomplished is creating yet another financial gambling market. Broadly speaking, we already have enough of those. And I guess you can still use it to buy drugs. (Although, with $10 transaction fees, probably not. The drug folks would kindly prefer it if this whole bitcoin mania could blow over, and people could go back to gambling in Vegas, or on out-of-the-money GME calls, or whatever, so they could do their business in peace.)
Of the bright predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, the only relevant one that came to fruition by 2021 is 'Many people speculating on bitcoin made a lot of money.'
Of the dour predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, only the ones I listed came true.