The benefit that the technology brings, sans speculation, should be the same regardless of whether it's a bear or bull market though. What about blockchain technology development that isn't tied to a tradable token?
There is an EIP 1337 "Subscription Services on the Blockchain" that I think will supplement/replace tokenomics. It's what it sounds like, a decentrilized subscription protocol that allows builders to monetize their d-apps with ETH based on recurring payments to access the services.
This is essentially the first step to web 3.0 and a universal login.
I guess DAG with a merkle tree data structure would be more appropriate. Blockchain should be reserved for DAG's that use Nakamoto Consensus (or similar) to determine the longest chain.