Every conversation about Ligate runs into the same question, eventually: why is this not an Ethereum smart contract? Every conversation, including the ones I have in my own head when nobody is around to ask. It is a fair question. It is also the wrong one, but explaining why takes a minute. This post is the why. No mechanism specifics, no formulas, no benchmark numbers. The technical paper for that lives in the research repo and gets better when people open issues.