Hive has shown that you don’t need smart contracts to build powerful, community-driven applications. With built-in features like escrow_transfer, recurrent_transfer, and custom_json

Two of those three are smart contracts 😅

As to the idea, yes, depending on who is asking for a loan and what the interest rate is, I would invest in Hive microloans. I used to use BTCjam and bitlendingclub before they shut down :'-(