AML implementation is a poor and misapplied user experience that is usually done as an excuse to prevent money laundering. Many services apply it arbitrarily with no scrutiny and use it to steal users funds. Unclear regulations per country dont help and unscrupulous actors take advantage.
Onchain and noncustodial services are either exempt or function autonomously, removing this particular duty of the state. They also typically have unlimited amounts that you can move, compared to arbitrary monetary amounts that centralized systems impose. “DeFi” efforts are being made to make the experience of using onchain noncustodial services as fast or faster than offchain custodial services and a lot of progress has been made towards that.
Regarding the actual money laundering everyone’s afraid of, even the strictest regulations never actually prevented that while taxing all business and financial institutions. The Patriot Act wouldn’t have flagged any of the 9/11 transactions, HSBC still laundered billions for the actual cartel, minorities go to jail for accidentally using over $10,000 in cash, and even Al Capone could have passed the KYC part of AML regulations, so who is this for? Any way its going to be moot and already is for a lot of people.
A popular asset management system is this: https://www.tokensets.com/
Maker and Compound allow borrowing backed by collateral.
Decentralized exchanges include the various DEXs and Uniswap.
All of these get substantial usage.