Blockstream wants to use Jade tokens. Probably because it gives the Liquid blockchain utility. Their Liquid tokens are not interesting because they are not used much. The struggle of network effects: Reach critical mass.
Today, more people have nostr accounts than Liquid wallets and I guess the trend is clearly in favor of nostr.
For a token, you need
* a cryptographic ID: To hold a digital token, you need the token to be assigned to something that you control. Your public key for example. The issuer's ID also needs to be established. Several people here on nostr attested to nostr:npub1jg552aulj07skd6e7y2hu0vl5g8nl5jvfw8jhn6jpjk0vjd0waksvl6n8n being the real deal.
* a tool to store that ID's credentials. Nostr clients do that and we are seeing hardware wallets to also provide this now
* a protocol for issuing and assigning tokens - nostr badges have these
* a protocol to transfer tokens - nostr so far completely lacks this but it could be added
Yes, nostr lacks global state so the issuer could over-issue and yes, the issuer wouldn't need to send certificates to relays for something like the Jade token to work but it makes sense to build on the nostr key infrastructure and for some applications it makes sense to have the tokens to be compatible with being stored on relays and publicly attributed to a user. Blockstream might want some of their Jade turn-over to be public. They might want to gift jades very transparently to influencers that then make give-aways etc.
The network effect right now is with nostr. We are deploying public key cryptography at scale and every use case adds to the network effect.
