part of me wants to work on a defi protocol

maybe defi + gaming? 

degamefi?

Do you mean players earning income directly through gameplay ( play to earn ) or should the focus be on in game staking and lending mechanisms ?

Btw, it’s really good

thinking about financial layers that aren't tied to any single game — protocols that players could access across different games and in-game assets 

so less about one game's economy and more about shared liquidity, rewards, and ownership across various games + ecosystems

Isn't that already happening at the wallet level? E.g. Warplets, Metamask, etc?

Agreed it's needed. 

I previously thought ENS and the like would take on that role to offer the clean UI/UX for the relationships between account, coins, + nfts.

not really, wallets provide almost no context about how any assets fit into any particular context or ecosystem or relate to one another 

they're private key manager first and disorganized gallery second

i'm talking about the pipes and relationships and ui/ux for onchain assets and financial txs for a gaming economy