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>The thing most bizarre to me about the crypto space over the last 5ish years (defi, staking, blah blah) is that it always appears to be a "circle jerk" for more crypto. E.g. crypto is borrowed in one currency to ... buy crypto in a different currency.

Can't you say the same thing about the finance system in general? eg. portfolio loans are just taking one financial instrument (stocks), converting it into another financial instrument (cash), just so you can buy yet another financial instrument (more stocks). Same goes for options, futures, swaps.

Stocks aren't just financial instruments, they represent a claim to real-world value creation that exists outside of Wall Street.

What's the "claim to real-world value creation that exists outside of Wall Street" for VIX futures or an interest rate swap?

I can follow the chain of causality to the real-world value creation from them. I can't do the same with the ponzicoin of the week, where people are only making money because other people are losing it. With no causal chain that leads to anything getting produced.

For a particular example of an interest rate swap, anyone whose business incomes are closely correlated to short-term loans, and whose expenses are closely correlated to long-term loans (or vice versa) would care deeply about them, because they allow them to hedge themselves against unpredictable changes in interest rates.

Sure, but my whole point is that all of the underlying assets of the "real" financial system have a real purpose - none of that is true with crypto. Stocks represent real ownership shares, loans in the real world are made to direct capital from those that have excess (savers) to those that need it for real purposes (invest in productive capacity, buy a house, etc.)

I'm just looking for some actual use cases of using crypto finance to finance something in the real world, and I can't seem to find any.

>I'm just looking for some actual use cases of using crypto finance to finance something in the real world, and I can't seem to find any.

DAOs (distributed autonomous organizations) and ICOs both fit the bill.

> With crypto "finance", I don't hear about or see any of these types of activities - it's always just plowing money into a different crypto scheme.

This is what the people lobbying for regulation are trying to achieve. If you want to hear about these activities, that’s where you should look.

I assume the volatility of crypto work against it being used for real world finance?

Well, it makes it great for use by real world finance.

Nobody is stopping you from using cryptocurrencies from funding legitimate business activities.

Exactly. No one is stopping me or anyone else, but no one does because crypto is a shitshow full of opaque risk, and the whole point of a financial system is to make risk explicit.