pull down to refresh
It is most certainly a new coin. If their marketing department was clever enough to call it a "sidechain" that is a very different story.
Certainly seems like a new coin, otherwise you could use BTC directly instead of needing to peg in. How is it different from any other wrapped BTC token?
A significant difference is the Liquid network doesn't use yet another token to enrich investors. Instead it uses L-BTC natively and which cannot be printed out of thin air.
https://help.blockstream.com/hc/en-us/articles/900001408623-How-does-Liquid-Bitcoin-L-BTC-work-
https://help.blockstream.com/hc/en-us/articles/900001386846-How-do-transaction-fees-on-Liquid-work-
Liquid network doesn’t use yet another token to enrich investors. Instead it uses L-BTC …<links to docs about transaction fees paid in L-BTC>
There’s no mining, only a trusted federation (aka Proof of Authority) that accepts transaction fees in the new token.
This is some kind of religious purism. The creators of Liquid aren't creating a new coin or a scaling solution. Liquid is a tool that enables actions using Bitcoin as the base value. It has trust tradeoffs in order to facilitate these tools.