I think the concept of a token is currently viewed as extremely negative due to historic attempted applications of "tokens" when it comes to digital currencies. Tokens tend to equal rugpull because they are representiative of something, in control by a centralised entity.

This is fair I think, and we should all look at it with suspicion and scrutinise it, but not let it mislead us from a potential, fairly good solution to scaling sats - Not stating you are, just stating.

Personally, I'm extremely suspicious of anything fedimint ecash. It seems backwards when we have a decentralised layer 1 that just works, it just has "high" fees and "high" confirmation times - Two things anyone would think we could find a perfectly plausible solution to whilst retaining the Layer 1's amazing properties.

Alas, years later, we have Nostr apps, Alby and even SN introducting and normalising fully-custodial solutions. Anyone not looking to give up custody, needs technical-know-how and infrastructrue to run their own LN nodes. I run my own LN Node and will for the foreseeable future. I will likely always choose the self-hostable self-custody option.

But I've come to realise most people won't. And I think that comes with a lot of risk. And so, the gears have shift from "How do we fix this pretty much entirely?" to "How do we improve this just enough to mitigate risk and balance custody?".

I'm starting to be of the mind that a federated network mostly run by community, accessible to be run by the community (LET ME RUN MY OWN, in essence, just like we do with Bitcoin nodes to help enforce honesty on others inc. miners), BASED ON the online/offline statuses of self-custody wallets actually strikes a fairly good balance. Risk solely increases based on offline time. As long as the self-custody wallets presented by apps have the option to withdraw directly to the timechain, somehow, someway.