My brother is really big into crypto, and convinced my dad to get $1k in ETH. Over thanksgiving, they were hanging out talking about crypto, and my dad said he wanted to mess around with swapping tokens around and layer 2's but didn't want to touch his principal. So he opened AAVE, deposited his ETH, and got a loan in about 5 minutes flat. I thought that was pretty cool? I've never taken a loan for anything but student loans but I imagine it would be infinitely more difficult and time consuming to get a small personal loan like that from a bank.

I definitely agree that a TON of the crypto space is super scammy, and think it's an absolute shame, I don't blame anyone for being scared off.

Arweave, for one, uses blockchain for a novel approach to data storage.