For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality.
I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance.
So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip?
There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.
To be fair, DeFi offers better returns than are commercially available to the average consumer (granted, with increased risk, but still).
A conventional Ponzi scheme also offers very high returns, at a very high risk.
Put another way: if this clear yield actually existed, it would be arbitraged into the dirt by Cumberland/DRW and Jump - not left to the retail schlubs.
I’ve been assuming that one of the companies in that space will pivot to basically modern PKI infrastructure (signed transactions, etc. without 90s baggage like PGP, decentralized only in the sense of working offline on cheap hardware well enough to replace a paper check with a signature using their phone’s secure element) long enough to declare victory and get acquired, at which all of the cryptocurrency sales guys cosplaying as developers will start claiming that’s what they had in mind all along.
You needn't have been alive to be aware of the history, you could, you know, read about history.