The Future of ETH and DeFi

As time permits, more regulations come in from centralized powers, and more dirt is cleaned out of the ecosystem every day, what does the future hold for Ethereum and DeFi?

or in other words, what new products will be the Uniswap of the next crypto bull run??

Obviously there is a lot of buzz about different ZK protocols such as ZK Sync that are bringing a new school of thought to the way that ETH scaling will work in the future, but in this post I want to discuss more about the new use cases that will be born out of the DeFi ecosystem.

Last bull run there were multiple shining lights that seem to have solidified their place within the ecosystem. From oracles, such as Chainlink, aggregators like 1Inch, lenders like Aave, and exchanges such as Curve and Uniswap. These protocols all started in the same place: as an idea, and have been built into multi billion dollar behemoths that we all get to enjoy today.

It's this level of prestige and importance that I would love to see out of some new protocols in the future of DeFi. People have different opinions about what these protocols will look like, some thinking that it will be the protocols that bring everyday people en masse to using blockchain, others believe that it's actually the protocols that will best serve the whales in DeFi that already have gargantuan sums of money in their wallets.

Personally, I side with the ladder of this argument. It's been proven by many born and failed startups that trying to get every day people to remember their 12 word seed phrase is an annoyingly difficult task, and even when you do, it turns into a flurry of speculation to only fizzle out into an uninviting downward spiral of negative price action, much like STEPN. It's these exact things that regulators across the world are trying to put a stop to, particularly in America.

Reasons like this lead me to believe that protocols that simply build into the more popular use cases of DeFi such as Sentiment, an undercollateralized lending protocol that has no 'native token' for their users to speculate on, have potential to see consistent growth that could lead them to having a very strong position going forward (as long as there is no catastrophic exploit of course.)

We have been going through some difficult times in the world of blockchain, but many traders, developers, and general enthusiasts are clearly here to stay, and this technology will certainly grow in the future. What does the rest of r/ethereum think?