I've been taking a break from Bitcoinia for the better part of a year. I had fallen for a scam, and was already pretty pessimistic on Bitcoin growth vis-a-vis a decentralized side/drive/statechain. I didn't (and don't) see private corporation "permission-ful" ("Proof of Public Identity?") federations as a valid scaling solution. So I decided to take a break from it all.
While I was away, I was toying with the idea of a Proof of Stake layer 2 with Bitcoin as the collateral. Did a search and came up with an article on Bitcoin Mag.
I must be missing something, because this looks like a public, permissionless, decentralized layer-2. And since the bonds are denominated on the base chain, which is Bitcoin, it is actually backed by a Proof of Work asset. Malicious "orchestrators" are penalized via bonds, and presumably kicked off the epoch and have to wait to be randomly selected for a peg-in.
I do love Lightning, but have become aware of its limitations, and hope it can run on a Spiderchain. If so, combined with the recent and upcoming changes to Lightning, this has me very optimistic.
I'm still making my way through the article posted by @soggycakes in September 2023. I'm wondering if any of y'all have done some research or have some thoughts on this.