Makes sense, and might explain why some of the companies chose to structure these efforts as either separate companies or separate programs. Still, as you point out, there haven’t been too many new entrants that are using this to disrupt incumbents in providing any off-chain services - or really, anything other than moving/trading tokens around.
Clearly blockchain is good for that. They’ve created a trillion dollar forex market (if we’re being charitable) or casino (if we’re not), where people can speculate on a thousand different currencies or digital gold/baseball cards/beanie babies/artworks.
But there doesn’t seem to be much success in getting much use case outside of that. Back in 2017-2018 there were a whole slew of new blockchain initiatives and projects. A host of new and existing companies drafted hordes of techs to try to apply blockchain to everything under the sun. Now five years later, it doesn’t appear that many of those efforts have really landed, especially on the ethereum platform. Maybe that’s just because DeFi and unregulated shadow banking sucked all the oxygen out of the room on ethereum. But it doesn’t show a lot of utility for the platform.