I was quite interested in the cryptocurrency ecosystem around 2017/2018, precisely because of the talks around smart contracts. I see these smart contracts to be just (in my opinion), confusing, error prone addressable state machines. Writing smart contracts (at least for Ethereum) has so many gotchas, that it's almost equivalent to rolling your own cryptography.
I'm not sure if issues around smart contracts are just the tooling, or developers are just rushing to push something out there; but the UX and DX is bad. I was hoping that Cardano would be a blockchain/cryptocurrency pairing that would make me interested again in this space, but their Plutus smart contracts[1] are something I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. On the upside, at least testing Plutus smart contracts with QuickCheck seems to have brought improvements to QuickCheck itself[2]
I'm not sure if issues around smart contracts are just the tooling, or developers are just rushing to push something out there; but the UX and DX is bad. I was hoping that Cardano would be a blockchain/cryptocurrency pairing that would make me interested again in this space, but their Plutus smart contracts[1] are something I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. On the upside, at least testing Plutus smart contracts with QuickCheck seems to have brought improvements to QuickCheck itself[2]
[1] https://playground.plutus.iohkdev.io/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_14jjJiuQ a fun little watch for those that like Haskell