Just a clarification, it's not "thousands of dollars" to deploy a smart contract to Ethereum, though a defi application might be comprised of a group of related

Just a clarification, it's not "thousands of dollars" to deploy a smart contract to Ethereum, though a defi application might be comprised of a group of related contracts. There's a limit on the size of a contract, and the largest contract one can deploy to Ethereum would cost about $120 at today's gas price and ETH price. For example, this transaction from a couple of hours ago deploys a contract that is at the contract size limit: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5ed0c6d517fa0bf7c5074bf49ae0f7363355079abedf08d015d106fd411ef2b9 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5ed0c6d517fa0bf7c5074bf49ae0f73633... You can see they spent $120 in gas fees to deploy it. When the network is incredibly busy, of course, this could be much higher (but when it's dead, it could also be as cheap as $40) At the peak of the bubble (ETH price around $5000), you're right, contracts this size would have been "thousands of dollars to deploy" when the network was congested. Even then, most contracts would have been cheaper, and you could still deploy contracts for $100-200 If ETH (the token) continues to appreciate in price then it's entirely possible "thousands of dollars" for a contract could become the norm, but that's obviously not a certainty, and if that does happen (before network improvements which may also decrease fees), there are always alternative blockchains and L2s that you could deploy Solidity contracts to.