It claims to be a sidechain yet the industry hasn't really defined exactly what that is. But the industry isn't old enough nor established enough to come together to agree on terms.
I think this is where I have questions as well. It may not be what other people in the space would consider a "side chain".
And that alone could create unfortunate misunderstandings and FUD along the way.
You want to know how bad the definition of sidechain is?
Namecoin(yes the first altcoin) is the world official sidechain to Bitcoin based on Satoshi's and the dev words...
As such merged mine=sidechains
Blockstream then made the term more popular by the use of pegged sidechain-a separate blockchain with an asset of an established one.
This was the merged mined papers.
Merged mine=sidechain still here
The Federation based sidechain paper came when finding and making a pegged asset "trustless" was found to be hard. It can be done at different costs see Drivechain.
At here is when Sidechain=merged mined ended and the essence came a blockchain that helps the original asset and favors it.
The next generation sidechain came when Extenstion blocks came during the great scaling wars. This would be an opt code in which some nodes can download and accept this "sidechain" like blockchain along with main chain and other nodes would only count main chain.
This idea was revived when Litecoin Foundation annoucned it was going to add Mimblewimble to Litecoin via extension blocks.
So at the root-the basic idea of sidechain is that as long the blockchain helps the original asset and is built on using the original asset as well.
We're creating a separate chain of blocks based on data on the Steem blockchain...if that's not a side chain I don't really know what is!
Intuitively, yeah.
But, we all know crypto space can be finicky. Lol