For a long time, blockchain systems has had trouble finding its "utility" as a product. As someone who's been in this space since 2013, I've seen a lot of attempts at trying to make the blockchain "useful" - which started with smart contracts, NFTs, token-generation, and DAOs.
These features are all powerful on its own, but the struggle to find its niche as a product is a very real one. Personally I was pretty disappointed during the hype cycle in 21' where the industry hard-pivoted to memecoins and scarcity models instead of trying to accomplish the big ambitions it used to have during its earlier years - Satoshi would probably be rolling in his grave right now if it weren't for the fact that he's probably still alive, just disappointed with the how the whole thing turned out.
But we know the technology still works - when people don't try to cut corners on the most important bits - lots of project made the mistake of decentralizing user-level access (e.g. fragmented, fork-happy L2s) rather than admin-level access, which is more complex to manage but absolutely necessary if they still want to maintain the claim of being a "distributed" system.
The industry's attempt to self-regulate its own intensions has failed - with a long history of failed lobbying efforts, including the recent CLARITY act that failed to pass. (The US is way behind what many Asian countries are doing right now, where these regulations are already in place and in production.)
Why did teia.cafe start with the arts community on TEIA and Tezos? Well, it's one of the few (if not only) places in Web3 right now where people use their wallets as their identity layer and build real histories on top of - and respects the ledger records enough to use it in day to day activities.
At some point, this will become the norm. It's the logical conclusion to where both AI and blockchain systems are going, imo - combining the two things are where the "utility" everyone is seeking actually turns into a reality.