Forget about smart contracts for another year or 2. ETH is being ruined by bad smart contracts for scam ICOs.

What I see here that is very promising is SSL encryption between nodes. Hard to believe that wasn't done before, because cleartext protocol is a huge vulnerability and privacy concern. The web implemented HTTPS ten+ years ago.

Also the design choices by DERO team are solid. Go is a fast yet versatile language, Cryptonight is good algo for mining and confirming, and the command line interface is good. Open source would be nice. CLI looks like a fork of a design I've seen before but can't put my finger on exactly which one... definitiely some Bytecoin lineage.