As best I can tell, the value props were 90%+ "more efficient crypto", "more decentralized crypto", "more private crypto". I think Compound had a different mechanism for rewarding validators, but even that's just fiddling with the finances of the network.
I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets, and there's FileCoin for distributed storage.
I tried asking Bard for more, and didn't get much, but ChatGPT-4 gave me a bunch: Golem ("decentralized supercomputer by allowing users to rent out their idle computing power to others"), Basic Attention Token (Brave's thing for fixing ads/micro-transactions, Chainlink ("decentralized oracle network that allows smart contracts to access data from external sources"), Siacoin ("Users can rent out their unused hard drive space to store encrypted files for others, in exchange for Siacoin"), Augur ("decentralized prediction market platform"), and Decentraland ("users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications"???)
Don't get me wrong, it makes sense that cryptocurrency's use-cases are mostly financial, but there was a lot of energy, much of it honest in this space. I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out), rather than just the thousand's "it's all a scam" dismissal. Golem and Filecoin/Siacoin both sound like they might actually solve real problems / create rel value.