The plan is to provide fee-free transactions simply by having liquid HBD in the wallet. In other words, there is no need to stake HBD to get transactions. It can simply happen as follows.
You are simply killing the main HIVE token in the VSC, it's as if HBD is the main way to interact with it.
HIVE is still very useful for RCs on the Hive side of things. VSC the network itself will consume quite a bit of Hive just for operating and with future plans it could even eat up several hundred thousand to support it's user base. However, the issue at hand is the Hive token cannot be used to power VSC as there is no way to easily obtain value from it by staking it for the network. HBD on the other hand is very simple and easy to use for accomplishing that.
That was a good answer. I hadn't really thought about the need for VSC to have to use Hive to operate on its part. A big project I think
Keep in mind, these are two different networks, both with costs associated with running them. Those have to be paid someone.
VSC could do like other smart contracts platforms, i.e EVMs, and charge a transaction fee. If it did that, would that affect HIVE?
It seems that VSC already answered my question about this. You're also right, using EVMs to pay fees for each transaction doesn't seem interesting or right for a protocol powered by the Hive network.
Depending upon what is built on there, it could be problematic.
They are on the right path there.