My general metric is when people use something for a purpose other than working on that technology. For example, the web very quickly passed that point very quickly because you had people sharing scientific information, building personal sites, using it for businesses which weren't selling web technologies, etc. where the underlying technology was the vehicle but not the purpose.

There haven't been many examples of that in the blockchain space so far — a few places accepting it in addition to credit card transactions, etc. — but almost all of it has been focused on generating business for various blockchains rather than being better than or even competitive with existing options (e.g. how many NFTs were marketed and priced based on their artistic merits versus “you're going to make a fortune if you buy now!”?). Do you have an good examples of things like that which are actually used by non-cryptocurrency people[1] and have some advantage from using this stack unrelated to selling tokens?

1. The equivalent of, say, the people I helped get online in the mid-90s because they wanted to join hobby forums like photo.net, email relatives, get stock quotes, etc. but weren't really interested in the technology in its own right.