If you want an example of one innovation, look at flash loans. Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled.
Better explanation:
This is the problem currently. There's ten thousand teams building and building, but each one of them is building yet another library or yet another tool. Nobody has any idea how to connect the crypto economy to the real world economy.
The only applications possible are ones that you can do within the cryptospace itself, like lending one crypto against another, or creating some creative gambling game.
Unless somebody can figure out how to bridge the cryptospace to the real world economy, the whole castle of cards will eventually crumble.
There's many applications like DeFiSaver that use flash loans to allow users to migrate debt between lending protocols without needing additional capital.
How about stablecoins and exchanges? This already ties economies.
Have you looked into the Ethereum ecosystem of 2021 by any chance?
Some examples:
- You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/
- Borrow stablecoins at 0% interest on your collateral => https://liquity.org/
- Musicians managing royalties of their work through NFTs => https://eulerbeats.com/
And there's a lot more.
Or 2 weeks to send a SWIFT.
DeFi has a UX/UI, onboarding and fee problems, but the technology is about 2 years old and has tremendous momentum and already enabling uses cases that reqire jumping through hoops in tradFi.
People invented Chainlink to solve this problem: provide real world data such as "package has arrived to its destination" to smart contract software. I don't think it has delivered on its promise yet.
Whenever I see someone say something like this for some blockchain, I wonder what exactly is exciting for them? Most dapps is about money and more money, I played with Ethereum before (like stress testing nodes), and would really like to know really innovating dapp these days -- I mean tech that solve existing real-world problems, not create new subjects to collect.