Some update:

I've finally gotten my first smart contract to compile and run on Localnet. The smart contract allows users to create a Solana SPL token, but it uses a PDA as a mint authority. This is done to prevent the token creators from minting indiscriminately as the idea I had was to only mint tokens proportionally to Etherfuse stablecoins.

I'm still confused about the economics of this whole thing so I'll be doing a lot of reading in the coming weeks.

As an aside, I actually need to implement image attachment on this platform. Hmm, more things to do and less time to do them smh