Will the Liquid sidechain be open to any user?

Question

With the recent start of the private beta of Liquid, the first sidechain is now in production on the Bitcoin network.

One of the features advertised is:

User Control – Users can hold their Liquid funds off of exchanges and in a wallet they control, enabling them to rapidly transfer funds to and from any participating exchange in the network.

It was my understanding that Liquid was primarily to facilitate payments betweent larger users in the Bitcoin network such as exchanges and payment processors.

The above feature seems contradictory with the company focus. Will everybody be able to have a wallet on Liquid?

Answer 1

Liquid wallets are open and accessible to anyone. This could either be SPV wallets such as Blockstream Green or the Elements Liquid node.

With these wallets you can verify transactions (your own transactions with Green, all transactions with the node). However, you can't produce blocks. To do that, you need to be one of the Liquid members. To become such a member, you need to go through Blockstream. At the time of writing, there are 33 members full list available here.