[iskander]

I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge podcast.

My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the participants are building things they know have no use and engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to justify drawing money in from the outside.

Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be managing private keys tied to money.

It's a very cool but failed idea.