The Quito stock exchange consists of over 300 companies in farming, forestry, power generation, medical care etc. They have physical and human capital and earn profits from their paying customers, whether or not people want to buy stocks which offer them a share of this profit
The AAVE platform consists of individuals lending recently printed tokens to each other to buy other recently printed tokens in what is essentially a zero sum game with no connection to the real world unless they can convince outsiders to pay even more money for some of the tokens.
The fact the latter is notionally valued at higher than the former pretty much underlines the OP's point about the lack of "real value" underpinning the whole thing...
The difference is momentum and trust. Crypto is underlined by trust. Permissionless trust and cross-border trust. Either people don’t trust the Quito stock exchange to return all of the money back to shareholders or they don’t see their money going up in value there. So people don’t give them their money.
The AAVE platform consists of individuals lending recently printed tokens to each other to buy other recently printed tokens in what is essentially a zero sum game with no connection to the real world unless they can convince outsiders to pay even more money for some of the tokens.
The fact the latter is notionally valued at higher than the former pretty much underlines the OP's point about the lack of "real value" underpinning the whole thing...