Wouldn't the lightning fedmints be better than liquid? With a wallet like Mutiny you can have lightning channels to some mints. This keeps you connected to the lightning network to spend and receive SATs. The fedmint gives privacy, but multiple mints gives greater decentralisation, like nostr relays.
Discussion
You're probably right, i spent a little bit of time trying to understand fediments but I decided against it on one aspect. Like liquid, your trusting a federation, but these would be your peers. For me, I had a hard enough time with managing a lightning node, I wouldnt wish that on my worst enemy, my network doesnt have many bitcoiners much less tech savy people, so to expect them to manage and run a federation with a guaranteed 100% uptime when even I couldnt manage something like that would be just another sat sucker. Honestly, much of my experience is tainted towards lightning, so I will avoid it as much as possible. Liquid offers a federation of bitcoin companies that know what their doing better than me, and whose businesses depend on their transparency and legitimacy. If i were to try an open federation like mutiny, i would be trusting that they dont rug me just like with the liquid federation, except they are mostly anonymous nostr users who value their privacy. All that said, it might very well be a better option.
Yeah. Mutiny is pretty new, but I imagine an ecosystem of fedmints like nostr relays. You could have dozens of mints that you trust. When you send a transaction the wallet could look for the best routing option, if the recipient and you shared a common mint the transaction would only need to be a eCash balance transfer. This would make regulatory pressure on custodians difficult. If a mint rugs, you are only risking 5-10% of your balance