General Overview
Why ETC
S&F needs a programmable settlement layer more than it needs a high-speed execution layer.
The protocol uses ETC because collateral, issuance, redemption, funding-rate accounting, and oracle consensus should not depend on a rollup sequencer, bridge, upgrade committee, or venue-specific chain.
ETC is not chosen because it is the most liquid execution environment. It is chosen because S&F does not want the execution environment to be the settlement authority.
App-wide collateral
- trader issuance and redemption
- liquidity-provider deposits
- oracle staking and bounties
- funding-rate and fee accounting
One settlement asset gives the protocol one accounting base.
Settlement tradeoffs
Every settlement choice carries a risk profile.
S&F chooses the slower and more neutral base. Execution can improve around the settlement layer without making the execution layer the source of truth.
Why not Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a strong monetary settlement layer, but S&F needs programmable pools, fungible position tokens, funding-rate ticks, oracle staking, MANA accounting, and automated issuance and redemption.
Those features require an expressive smart contract layer. Bitcoin-adjacent systems can add that, but then the protocol logic lives outside Bitcoin L1.
Not only technically possible on ETC
S&F-like contracts could be deployed on other programmable chains. The ETC choice is about the trust story: canonical settlement should be credibly neutral while execution can scale elsewhere.