Maybe the crypto massadoption has to come first.
but if you say that there are not really practical uses right now, only a few testimonials (cryptokities), how will the massadoption go then?
How will people use cryptocurrencies then? only for payments?
This is a really good question with a difficult answer. Because what blockchain tech misses, and what has become the end goal of just about anything in this time and age, is convenience. Blockchain tech is not easy to use, it is slow and it is inefficient.
Paypal is more convenient than Bitcoin.
Dropbox is more convenient than Sia, Storj, or whatever.
AWS is more convenient than XEL, Golem and all the others.
What blockchain is and what the others are not, is being decentralized and hard to censor. Being hard to censor has seen its use in countries like Venezuela, where people have an actual real life use case for cryptocurrencies, which is hedging against hyperinflation. Let's face it, in the "western/first/developed" world, the only real mass use case of cryptocurrencies is to get more fiat money value. Most traders are happy sitting in fiat when the markets go down.
Decentralization is not that easy to come by either. The general narrative is that this would let people use and sell ressources they were unable to trade before. Like, when you get a new smartphone, you have tons of ressources you don't need. It comes with 64 GB storage, but for the first 6 months, you only need 30. With a working decentralized sharing and micropayment ecosystem, you could rent out the remaining 34 GB to a cloud storage service. If you don't use it, the processor you paid for to do stuff is doing nothing. You could rent it out. Same with internet access. Your phone could be a hotspot for others who have no direct internet access.
This vision sounds nice, but it has a huge problem: the economics don't add up. For one, you'd probably earn close to nothing, a few cents a day. So little that you soon realize that it's not worth the effort you have to put into it. With all the organizing, updating, managing your tokens and all, you might be even working below minimum wage. Also, you are using much more electricity and your hardware wears off faster. At the same time, somewhere, someone has access to cheap electricity and hundreds of computers and storage units. That guy_gal is able to work at a competitve level, because he_she doesn't manage one unit, but hundreds at the same time, droppig the price and forcing out all the others who just wanted to pay for their new smartphone or whatever.
Maybe this can be overcome with absolute automatisation. Say, your phone does all that stuff for you without you even noticing it. Then, maybe, you have a case.
Blockchain projects thrive under pressure, because that's what they are built for. They are tanks: Slow and inefficient under normal circumstances. You wouldn't want to get your groceries with them. But under hard, inconvenient circumstances, when normal cars crap out, they show what they are built for.
I guess this doesn't really help much. Maybe we really need a full-blown crisis to help blockchain tech reach mass adoption. But maybe we can get them in "through the backdoor" as well. For one, we still have a long way to go when it comes to convenience.
For another, we shouldn't rule out the power of games.
Games have been around since before humans existed. Even animals play. Games and playing have an extremely real life application: they help learning in a safe enviroment.
When it comes to blockchains shortcomings, here's the thing: games are supposed to be inconvenient. They are intended to present you with a challenge. At the same time, they define their own rules, which means, you have no hard-pressing real life problem to address. Provided you manage to get people interested in the first place, this an ideal enviroment to show off tech and, ideally, to evolve it.
I think I've posted here before about having a chess tournament on XEL, with multiple teams having a fixed amount of XEL and trying to write a chess algo, which uses XELs network to play chess. Now, I don't know if chess is really the best game for something like this, but the general idea still stands:
Host a tournament on XEL. Get teams of students involved. They'll learn what XEL is and what it is capable of. They'll remember when they need something to solve a problem for them.
