[rodiger]

I don't think they're useful to most people right now (or maybe ever), but there are some cool things in DeFi that are normally reserved for large institutions/not possible in traditional finance:

1. Being a liquidity provider to get a cut of exchange fees (https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/V3-overview/conce...)

2. Flashloans for arbitrage (https://aave.com/flash-loans/)

3. Autonomous governance for protocol updates (https://compound.finance/governance)

4. Decentralized perpetual contracts (https://www.perp.com/)

5. Decentralized mutual insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/)

Many/all of these depend on speculation to derive value, but there's added value nonetheless