Trading activity still dwarfs 'real' usage
It would be dishonest to close this course without naming what the previous lessons' progress doesn't fix. A large share of on-chain activity today, across mainnet and L2s alike, is still trading, speculation, and financial activity looping within crypto itself, buying, selling, providing liquidity, chasing yield, rather than blockchains being used to do something a person outside the industry would recognize as an everyday task. Stablecoin payments and tokenized treasuries, covered earlier, are real and growing exceptions, but they remain exceptions within a much larger volume of purely financial, often short-term-speculative activity.
This matters because it's easy to look at rising transaction counts or total value locked in DeFi protocols and read that as evidence of broad real-world adoption, when a meaningful share of it is better described as a self-contained financial market trading with itself. Neither dismissing that activity as meaningless, real value does change hands and real risk is being priced, nor mistaking it for mainstream utility is accurate.