As an American, I’ve always viewed chains as similar to the settling of the west. Huge swaths of land (much like blockspace) can be impressive, but they need settlers and a productive capacity to be worth much.

There’s a reason why the czarist nobility would note the number “souls” as well as acreage in their holdings. Unworked land and empty blockspace are just idle resources.
When you pause on it for a moment, this should make sense to a person living in the modern economy. Labor and capital combine to produce goods and services people value enough to exchange money for.
So blockchains need settlers, and those settlers need productive things to do. Sometimes these are familiar activities that service the local market - almost every town needs a grocery store and almost every chain needs a DEX.
But there ultimately needs to be some comparative advantage to doing *something* on that land or chain.
Well, unless you have guards that keep people in, which is the unfortunate case in some historical cases, but I’m not aware of any chains that have acted as a prison.
It’s worth pausing here to remember that a comparative advantage doesn’t have to be an absolute advantage. That’s a much longer discussion, but a chain needs to have settlers, those settlers need to do something that is ultimately offered for trade with another economy (be it Ethereum, Solana, Singapore, Europe, or any other imaginable economic ecosystem).
To date, this has mainly been financial services, entertainment (e.g. NFTs), or the intersection of the two. Both also have real-world similarities to locales that are desolate, remote, or lacking natural resources.
Las Vegas and Salt Lake City are in deserts. Jersey and the Caymans are prominent because of their friendliness to financial services.
Chains similarly have to always remember that what they need are productive capacity, not simply a pile of idle assets, sitting onchain like a pile of gold.
For those who read to the end, you could have read the comic panel below and gotten the same point in less time. So thank you for sticking with me!