Also, jrockway shared relevant Auth0 comments in this discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180939.
Is your reluctance around smart contracts influenced at all by https://www.hello.coop/pages/financing.html?
There's well-documented failures of so-called "smart" contracts, and IMO building something like this on top of one is a recipe for disaster, just like the rest of the crypto-blockchain ecosystem.
In contrast to many crypto projects, we are only using smart contracts for financing Hellō so that we can separate the return on investment from the cooperative governance. This removes one of the common failure modes of governance gone awry.
There is significant innovation in the crypto ecosystem and while there are failures (as there will be with any novel technology) there are also successes. As we don’t need to issue any smart contracts in the immediate future, we will be able to build upon the successes.