At quick glance that "unlink" step between the on chain token and the in-network token is the weakest link in this promise of a privacy preserving monetization model. I'd like to see a cryptographers audit on their final solution, they seem to be bouncing between ecash, ZKSTARKS and SNARKS.

Also with their talks of KYC compliance, I worry now that we'll see on-chain KYC requirement for that initial token purchase, requiring complete trust in the "unlinking" process and exposing metadata about your SimpleX usage. Right now we enjoy complete plausible deniability of even having used SimpleX provided it was downloaded through Tor and servers are connected via .onion addresses.

If we can purchase the token with Monero AND the unlink step is cryptographically bulletproof, I'm quite pleased with this model, those are big ifs however and recent regulatory development doesn't make me confident that that would remain the case for long.

Unclear for me, but I think this will only affect their own server pool or anyone that want to contribute server power in exchange for this token thing. any other self hosted server will not need this, at least that's how it appears to be at first glance. Time will tell us once this gets implemented.