I have covered it a lot throughout the past but probably worth bringing to the forefront again. The way I think about Liquid is as a pseudo custodian distributed across jurisdictions with privacy built into all transactions. A federation is still just an IOU in a certain sense, but with a far higher difficulty of a hack, much better provenance when it comes to full reserve and transparency, completely open codebase, and with privacy within liquid (regarding amounts) from even the operators of the network. It’s essentially a highly optimized and more secure custodian model that mitigates the “single trusted third party” problem. A model that’s specifically unique to bitcoin.