I've been struggling to try to open minds to this possible framing. I will say, it's easier for myself personally to reason about it when the ecash issuance is based upon a network than a single issuer, though it could be argued that it's the same either way.

It's possible the value of it is always exactly 1:1 of the underlying pegged asset. It's also possible it's worth more during times of high demand, such as when there's high chain usage. We can't perfectly specify exact value between two assets because it's always based on free markets. And there's no such thing as a perfect amount of work on both ends, and value is derived upon work with S&D. Though I think one thing can be true and that there's no expectation that the ecash will go up based on a single entity's work, so it removes the securities concern.

When you start thinking about it as a separate networked asset, it could be considered another type of DLT, and if it is then the network interoperability starts to look like cryptocurrency swaps, which means the swapping function is an exchange, which does not imply custody or expectation that you can redeem the other asset for the same exact exchange rate at any point in the future.

I 100% sympathize with potential confusion trying to conceptualize this. I think we as a community need to find more nuanced differences when we talk about legal custodianship (or not) with what we mean by different trust levels. A non custodian cryptocurrency could not be very trusted. Almost all in my opinion are not trusted, but I wouldn't call a group of Ethereum PoS miners (or other PoW based crypto miners) a custodian.

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Thank you for writing your thoughts on this matter and walking through them.