Regarding the smartcoins, to revive most of them Bitshares 'simply' needs to increase in price to a point above undercollateralization. Until then some of the committee owned smartcoins cannot be borrowed and have a largely undercollateralized value.
There's nothing preventing anyone creating a new smartcoin, multiple privatized smartcoins have been created, such as Hertz, Hero and Honest.USD.
These privatized smartcoins can have competitive settings, innovative financial theories, and most importantly a fresh slate for users to begin borrowing, however there are huge hurdles to overcome for these new privatized smartcoins to gain traction namely:
- Getting price feed producers for your smartcoin is very difficult; it's a multi week task to get several price feed publishers to add your asset, nevermind getting your asset added to existing price feeding scripts. You're more likely to have your peers feed the smartcoin than for the witnesses or committee to do so.
- Once price fed and borrowable, you need to convince BTS DEX users to borrow it, to trust the price feeds and to trade it. The task becomes one of marketing.
- Borrowing is largely a manual task, there doesn't seem to be many bots out there automatically borrowing smartcoins and maintaining their collateral.
- If the backing collateral is highly volatile, people might not borrow due to risk of liquidation.
I'd say perhaps to avoid a BTS collateral death spiral, the collateral of a smartcoin should be an exchange backed asset like XBTS.BTC, so that CEX cannot easily manipulate the price of the collateral asset to cause indefinite global settlement.
Some of the new smartcoin settings like individual settlement funds also can help avoid breaking the smartcoin if the collateral value craters.
There's huge potential for smartcoin tech, it's just that most/all of them used BTS as collateral, used CEX provided prices for price feeds, then went into a death spiral as the BTS price dropped.
Locking up more BTS as collateral, making less BTS liquid, is great, but we have other means of doing so now on the dex, credit deals, vesting balances and liquidity pools for example, plus the DEX harvests BTS fees from every blockchain operation, so not using BTS as the collateral isn't a detriment to BTS.