[mirceal]

That's not how lightning works. While it's true that the transactions are off-chain there is no trust element involved.

A channel between 2 entities is backed by real bitcoin and a scheme to manage the ledger based on bitcoin primitives (multisignature).

Lightning is just a series of channels + routing, so in effect it's a path of channels between you and the party you are transacting with + ledgers of those channels updating with the value that is being moved. At any point in time you can close any channel and materialize however bitcoin you have on your side.