[andutu]

I probably am massively understating it yes, but I see no reason why an ecosystem around Monero can't flourish that enables sort-of smart contract capabilities. But like you said, it would take a huge amount of effort to enable smart contracts on Monero while not compromising privacy guarantees.

It does seem to be a tradeoff. Solana has smart contract support with low fees, but its network is very centralized compared to other ones and even went down twice. Despite being relatively young, they have flashy PR events in Lisbon and high profile VS backers to hype it up, but again so far most applications built on Solana go back to some form of tokenomics/financial engineering and NFTs.

Writing smart contracts is getting easier and easier with the barrier of entry being how much you're willing to spend on gas really. Hopefully they start expanding into more interesting apps.

[opportune]

Solana has a company behind it, Monero has a couple foundations I think but it's mostly a bunch of independent devs behind it (some of which, like Fluffy Pony, definitely have enough money to spend on marketing if they wanted to). It's the difference between something that is pseudo-decentralized and actually decentralized.

I don't see how you can implement smart-contracts in general on Monero because it's not programmable. You can write small arbitrary messages via tx_extra and in theory some other chain that looks at the Monero chain could read that, but because tx_extra messages are direct-writes and aren't automatically encrypted using the wallet keys or anything, there is nothing special about them besides them being immutable. In fact in some ways tx_extras could contribute to deanonymizing the chain if it created correlations between ring signatures, and Monero devs have discussed removing it several times.

There's a question of whether Monero itself could be extended to be programmable and actually do things with those messages, but I'm guessing the answer is probably no because it would bloat the chain and have questionable value (right now Monero is "unixy" in that it does one thing and does it well), even if it were possible to do.