"The idea of creating value through contracts is interesting. However, I fear that it will not produce the price stability that a successful cryptocurrency needs." - this is one of my fears as well.
I believe there will be more tokens that will win in this race of market cap and adoption, and most of them will need to be stable and predictable to do so. The next wave of crypto will be centrally issued by companies that do a lot of business and have sufficient weight to create a stable coin without backing it up in FIAT and there is a strong possibility they will take over a large share of the market.