I do not think that word means what you think it means.
People used ledgers right after they were created, by definition, and long enough to go through all these years without that practice disappearing and without speculation to prop them up. So they brought value from the very beginning. Speculation prevents this logic from applying to blockchains (the value is making money by extracting it from gullible users).
> the trend
Which trend? If anything it's stagnant with just more scams, I still don't know anyone who uses cryptocurrencies for anything other than speculation.
1. Uniswap now has deeper liquidity on several major trading pairs than the leading centralized crypto exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance:
https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance
2. The volume of stablecoins on the blockchain is growing rapidly, notwithstanding the recent collapse of LUNA/UST:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255835/stablecoin-marke...
The closest analog to crypto distributed ledgers is, well, ledgers. If you look around you, there probably isn't a single product that could have been produced without the adoption of double entry accounting. And yet that adoption process took around 300 years.
Crypto is on the exact same trajectory. When people look around them in 300 years, there probably won't be a single product that could have been created without distributed ledger technology. But obviously this isn't going to happen in any of our lifetimes.
The IQ test is being able to see the trend even though crypto is currently at literally 0.00% adoption (on the basis of total financial transactions). Sooner or later, reality always goes to par with the math.