Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee.
Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example.
Even if the crypto market is unstable, the last years it generally went up while holding USD or EUR basically was a loss game valued against ex. CHF.
I personally cant imagine a world without blockchains anymore.
Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.
Let me give you a real world example. You buy something for $10. Then ethereums $5 fee sounds crazy compared to 3% or so for creditcard or paypal. However transfer $1000 and those 5$ suddenly sound a lot better than the 30$ the creditcard or paypal charges.
This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain found some straws to hold on to. It could have been one of those millions go-nowhere projects just as likely.
I think there are legit use cases for it, but ultimately, we are still far from mass adoption and without the crazy monetary gains, I don't even believe anyone would talk about blockchain these days. Technology wise, it's not a strong value proposition. We can do pretty much everything without blockchain. Yeah there are some cases where trustlessness helps, but once this problem would become serious enough, it's not hard to build blockchain technology. It basically follows directly from basic principles defined by the problem. And the fact that everyone "thinks blockchain is new", already proves that the problem actually doesn't really exist.