One of Sila Money's applications was that they were able to convince banks to do faster domestic ACH transactions by putting the transfer messages on a public blockchain, instead of bothering with some kind of shared database or permissioned consortium blockchain. (You can add arbitrary data to most cryptocurrency transactions).

Another one that comes to mind is pNetwork. That is a big bridge, was the subject of a large and amateurish hack. There are now many bridge technologies. I had found it interesting that it was so popular but had no token, seemed like it was popular in Asia which contributed to me missing it before the headlines. Nowadays most bridges don't have a token associated with them though.

Sometimes what I do to find projects that don't surface from seeing a big token price movement or don't surface from hearing people talk about it, is to search for certain code signatures for a constructor or a popular function that programmers might re-implement.