Memes have helped battle-test AMMs, bonding curves, flash loans, perp DEXs, and on-chain liquidity at scale...
The infrastructure and business models they helped stress-test and refine look highly likely to change the (financial) world.
There was no path imo where traditional players like NYSE just adopted crypto rails in 2017. Those rails had to be forged under real economic pressure, and defi summer, trenches etc etc were the only places with the risk appetite where that could happen.
It’s the same way porn drove internet payment gateways, video compression, and broadband adoption - enabling the trillion-dollar "respectable" internet companies that followed.