It's ultimately a trust-based solution, and Scamson referring to it as an L2 is the first trust violation. I can accept trusted solutions when they're honest and decentralizing, but Liquid has doubled-down on the opposite.

Federation is also a scam word, trustodial is trustodial. We have no idea how many signatories are actually in the federation in terms of how distributed those keys are, every Federation is Schrodinger's node.

The infrastructure still has a single point of trust in Blockstream, rendering any actually federated peg pointless.

It's another example of broken incentives, they generate swap fees and think they're cute by scamming regulator with technobabble to make it sound not like a money business. In so doing, they have to mislead to the unsophisticated user even if most of us know the truth.

Liquid is not a L2... is a sidechain.

Liquid was a good intention. It was coming up early in the block size wars as a proposal for exchanges, to have some kind of interoperable network to move funds between them, faster and cheaper than BTC onchain, but still using BTC.

I kinda agree with that use case. A federation that is moving funds privately between them.

But then LN was launched and come in force and Liquid kinda lost the use case. The block size war was also over, segwit in place and onchain mempool liberated, so even the exchanges that were excited about Liquid, they were still preferring to do it over onchain as usual.

LN got more and more grip and Liquid was slowly forgotten and became useless. Now Blockstream, want to push people into using it as it would be a "cheapest and fastest" way instead of LN, because they do not want to see it terminated (as nobody is using it). In the end they put a lot of effort and money to build it. IMHO they should go back to the original idea to be used for private entities and not pushed to large masses of users.

Now all those onchain maxis want to use Liquid instead of preparing in time, with calm new LN channels. That's why this crazy mania with Liquid. But as usual when the onchain fees are going down, Liquid use is going to meaningless until zero.