[pcthrowaway]

You're overlooking defi, this is the thing being revolutionized right now; you can make all the transactions you can afford to pay transaction fees for, trade hundreds of assets, swap tokenized USD for tokenized EUR, all without an intermediary.

To be candid, you are generally trusting the contracts you're interacting with to be bug free, but you are able to audit the code just as easily as anyone else, and verify that the contracts are as advertised. Unlike dealing with a bank portal, all the logic running on the blockchain is visible and verifiable.