Gaining interest on cryptocurrencies by providing liquidity so other people can speculate on cryptocurrencies, prediction markets (literally gambling on cryptocurrencies), NFTs (speculating on infungible cryptocurrency tokens), and some virtual game where you can further speculate on NFTs with a touch of gamification.

Nothing seems to tie into any real world usefulness, everything ties back into itself where the core is always 'will the value of my internet coins go up'.

The only single useful thing cryptocurrencies can do is you can buy drugs from the darkweb, semi-anonymously, or maybe completely if you use something like Monero.

Also if you plan to buy a house, a bank can give you a mortgage over let's say 25 years where information about your identity, income and credit history is used as a risk assessment, and the loan is backed by the whole existing legal system where your home can be repossessed if you fall behind on payments. You can get a LTV ratio of even 95% in some cases.

How would this work in a decentralized way ever? On the other hand, if you already have, let's say 500k in the bank to buy the house outright, why would you involve cryptocurrency in the transaction. The counterparty is going to probably want to receive their money dollars in a bank somewhere, are you sure that a bank is not going to ask any questions when you do your magic conversions to dollars from crypto and try to send someone 500k?

This doesn't integrate into the real world well unless the other person selling wants to receive crypto already and is ready to take upon all the risks themselves that transferring, accepting and holding cryptocurrency entails. At that point you don't need to do the conversion magic anyway.

The reason for involving crypto in this scenario is so you don't have to sell your crypto assets. This will be more useful going forward as platforms allow users to use NFTs as collateral for example.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...