Agreed about practical applications, but an exchange is a business, it is supposed to earn money, do you say it needs to be subsidized?
It is a good model that you build a good infrastructure and let the people with entrepreneur spirit build more efficient business and applications on top of it.
It seems the financial assets trading market is a good starting market for Byteball to target. This market is in the front line being heavily explored by both public and private chains. Lots of promotion work have been done by the existing platforms. The network effect and the awareness in this front will benefit Byteball if Byteball is much better than the existing platforms.