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In review of this Token-22 extension, it says that token account owners can reassign ownership to another address: https://spl.solana.com/token-2022/extensions#immutable-owner

I am having a hard time visualizing exactly what this means.

What are the implications of this? How is it useful for this to be allowed sometimes? How do its dangers manifest and in what scenarios do we want to prevent this?

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Metaplex docs have a great explanation and diagrams for understanding the relationship between wallets, token accounts, and mints. Recommend looking through this page: https://docs.metaplex.com/programs/understanding-programs

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Token accounts have an owner field, the docs you referenced seem to be saying that there will be an option to make the owner field immutable, and ATAs will have the owner immutable by default

Since the address for an Associated Token Account is derived using a token mint and a user's publickey, you would not want the owner of the Associated Token Account to be anything other than the user's publickey.

However, if a token account was initialized with a randomly generated keypair, you may want to have the ability to change the owner the token account.

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    Thanks for the great answer! It seems that in the common case of building programs that utilize tokens, we would want to utilize this immutable extension of Token-2022 and make all ATAs immutable by default and always remain immutable. Let me know if you believe that common case rule of thumb is reasonable.
    – OCDev
    Commented Sep 10, 2022 at 3:31

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