> You do hodl your own keys with Ark, and those keys can exit unilaterally after one block (comparable to onchain levels of sovereignty, pluse state-chain security before that moment, which is less than a DryjaPoon channel but more than you can say onchain). Worth pointing out that Ark doesn’t materially “scale” without adding payment channels on top (ie Timeout Trees). Until that point, you’re really stuck with the statechain model, which has a highly-trusted third party, as you note. > In very high fee scenarios, unilateral exit is economically feasible for most amounts in Ark, but only for very high amounts in DryjaPoon channels. Huh? Ark is strictly more expensive to unilaterally exit than classic lightning. > Running your node is a bit orthogonal. It's just that an Ark client node on top of a L1 node is a trivial thing, unlike a node to manage DryjaPoon channels. Also huh? You’re comparing apples and oranges. Yes running a full routing node is complicated to manage, but having DryjaPoon channels in a wallet is not fundamentally complicated (see eg Phoenix). The second model (“client” to an LSP) is more comparable to Ark, and of course as mentioned above if you want scalable, trustless Ark you need payment channels anyway, so it’s strictly more complicated!