FYI: virtual channels are implemented since 2022 in LDK for [load balancing](https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2022/02/23/#ldk-1199) and [JIT channels](https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2022/12/14/#ldk-1835).
New blog post: https://petertodd.org/2025/fake-channels-and-rgb-lightning
tl;dr: the fact that you can route over fake channels on lightning, means implementing Lightning on top of client-side-validated tokens like RGB is much easier than you'd expect.
Probably not a new idea. But someone's gotta write it down...
Discussion
Yes, there's a lot of variations of the idea for clients with private channels. But in my article I'm specifically talking about public channels. That's what makes them interesting for lightning over client-side-validated tokens: arbitrary nodes can route payments over them without having to validate that the channels are real. That drastically reduces the total amount of data you need to route.