You do a huge disservice to the technology stack that is Ethereum - it's not crass and shallow, it's really quite an elegant system

The only crypto I'm interested in is Monero. What's do you like about Ethereum?

It's programmable, so you're not just running useless hashes. And with Proof of Stake it's way more efficient than Bitcoin.

Programmable doesn't mean anything to me. Is there any useful things made with Ethereum for privacy and self-custody?

A) really weird to see knee jerk crypto tribalism in 2026.

B)Specifically regarding self custody? Quite a few. Argent is one notable example https://argentwallet.io/

No tribalism here. If another cryptocurrency provided low fees, privacy-by-default, and a good track record I would totally use it.

I'm simply curious as I've always seen defi as weird because nothing i've seen seemed useful.

I guess you haven't paid much attention to defi, then. DAI for a example is another defi project that creates an autonomously pegged trustless and permissionless stablecoin.

Rocketpool is a project that allows users to contribute to the proof of stake system with very small amounts of capital, and share in the returns thereof, again trustlessly.

There are miles and miles of useful projects out there. Any truly permissionless ecosystem is going to be full of scams, that's the nature of the beast. It doesn't mean that there aren't extremely clever and elegant projects being built by very talented teams of developers trying to make something that reduces the amount of global suck.