While I understand what you mean by self-referential and it is true that a lot of the economic activity in the crypto space is centered on crypto-assets, it's also becoming more and more connected to the real financial system. Stablecoins mirror real world currencies, synthetics mirror real world assets such as stocks. You have to keep in mind that decentralized finance currently only has 2 million wallets (so even less users) and has been around for less than 2 years. But the space is growing and tokenization of real world assets is increasingly common. [0]

Alchemix may be self-referential because it relies on crypto yields, but you could replicate its organizational model in the real world. It would be something like an overcollaterized hypothecation union with none of the overhead of the IT and employees. The way you can use the funds you get from your loan are also very much non-referential. Here [1], one user mentions several potential use cases from charity to crowdfunding.

I don't think there are DAOs outside of the crypto space, that does not make them less interesting as social experiments. Andre Cronje from iYearn recently introduced a decentralized payment system for the organization. [2] Even if its use is for a "self-referential" project, it's still fascinating to see how the relationship between wages, labor and consumers is being redefined in a model that is fundamentally different from that of the corporation.

Kleros is an arbitration layer, it has suffered from Ethereum gas prices recently (since it's meant to be a mean of primarily adjudicating small claims) but is very much active in development and user base. They've also developed a proof of humanity system as an extension to their arbitration offering. People have used the Kleros courts to contest payment of poorly done translation jobs and resolve ecommerce disputes. It may sound unimpressive, but at the size of ecommerce it's a potentially big market that would give any online retailer the opportunity to outsource their dispute resolution service.

Filecoin is used, although I'd say it still mainly serves crypto-savvy customers (I've used it for personal file storage as it's cheaper than s3). iExec has built projects with a number of corporate partners. I'll agree that the actual adoption is small compared to the valuation if you compare to real world companies, but that does not make the possibilities less interesting.

[0] https://duneanalytics.com/rchen8/defi-users-over-time

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/b05crypto/status/1380768156029841...

[2] https://medium.com/iearn/decentralized-payroll-management-fo...

[3] https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer