In theory, a crypto project could provide value (not money, they're different things) to its users. For instance, there are experiments with distributed games where assets are NFTs. In theory, this provides the basis for independent games sharing unique assets among themselves.

In practice, nobody's doing this (even those game devs who are minting assets as NFTs are keeping the assets to one game, making the whole exercise pointless) and it seems probable that nobody really wants it.

But the point being I do believe theoretically there are "legitimate" applications where the decentralization of assets is useful. I just have yet to see an example in the wild (or even to imagine a concrete thing I could make where this would really be the case).