Smart contracts definitely have a tradeoff between new toolset/languages vs infrastructure level features. With smart contracts, anyone can write code for the c

Smart contracts definitely have a tradeoff between new toolset/languages vs infrastructure level features. With smart contracts, anyone can write code for the chain vs the "write your application to be deterministic" approach where new code needs to be at a minimum vetted by some central org/group, though they're usually written by the vendor/provider/etc. Each has its strengths/use-cases. For inter-org I prefer the smart contract approach vs the intra-org can see the benefit of using regular code -- it's not like you're worried about malicious code in the intra-org case. I do think that smart contracts increase the utility overall (sorta like having SQL for a DB > not) and improve its reliability (accidentally non-deterministic code can be a bit worrying). As for Tendermint BFT, it's one of the few that somehow I never got to dig into at JPM. Do you know if Tendermint BFT's performance & performance-vs-scale numbers are published? These are notoriously hard to come by and I'm always curious for more data-points on the matter.