Edit: fixing babble
I am interested in this space, but I do share this criticism that so many of the things touted as evidence of it being useful are fundamentally circular. Take the first three things from the parent comment: Aave, Compound, Yearn. None of these make sense if there is no value in the cryptocurrencies they allow you to lend, borrow, and invest. But then they can't themselves be evidence that there is value. It's circular. Same thing with Gnosis Safe; it's only useful to have a multisig controlling crypto assets if those assets have value.
I think the current thought is that NFTs are what does / will bring inherent value or value connected to the rest of the world in some way onto the blockchain, and then everything else derives its value from there. This seems like a tenuous and somewhat shaky foundation to build so much hype atop, but it's at least a theory of the case that makes more sense to me than the circular "ethereum is valuable because of Uniswap and Aave".
It's a way of tying names to public keys in a decentralized way. It doesn't have to be used only for identifying Ethereum wallets.
> self-referential babble
Second, crypto boosters -- I am not one, but interested and not pessimistic -- would say that an economy or a monetary system is nothing but a closed, self-referential bubble that has the useful property of sometimes correlating to predictable real-world activity. It's an abstraction over the real world: not the real world itself, but a way to influence it. It it were the real world, you would presumably have a much easier time determining whether and how much inflation is actually rising. As it is, you have a debate over it today because numbers say one thing, and people experience another.
The crypto people are attempting to bootstrap just such another system, except one that doesn't rely on central banking. So I don't think self-referential is an effective critique then, because that's the intention.
Maybe the core question of this entire endeavor is whether the legal system is a necessary component for layering a system of abstraction on top of the real world, or merely a useful one.