Hey! I’m the CEO of @voltage_cloud (https://voltage.cloud) and I think we could be a really good fit for you. We are a Bitcoin development platform and we do a lot with Lightning. Check us out and happy to hear any feedback. We have a lot planned for this year to make things stupid simple. Feel free to reach out with any questions: graham@voltage.cloud

At @voltage_cloud we have a start up program as well to help get your project off the ground! https://voltage.cloud/startup-program/

Hey there, Graham from Voltage (the LSP Mutiny uses). I'll let the Mutiny team comment on the actual issues, LDK, sweeps, etc because we don't directly work on that. I just wanted to comment that any time this happens we work with Mutiny to send all funds back to users. So I understand the concern and annoyance, but you always get your money back. I know there's a lot of work ongoing to prevent this and make it better so it's one of those subpar solutions until we get the right solutions in place.

Not a lot to share, but lots of great stuff. I think 2024 will be a really good year for Lightning. There'll be a bunch of new stuff and preparing for or capturing the next bull cycle.

Got it, understood. That makes sense and that's basically how we have built Flow 2.0. A user requests a payment through our LSP, we detect when the payment is coming in and zero-conf open up a new channel to that mobile node to finish the payment. All noncustodial and just in time.

I 100% agree with you. I think no one can specialize in all the things. Lightning has a very big surface area and there's a lot of different things you can do with it. Early folks had to build the full stack like you said, but I think we'll definitely see less of that. Especially as you think about how difficult it is to run an LSP from a capital standpoint. Not everyone is going to have the large amount of upfront capital that you need to start an LSP for their wallets. You'd have to have millions of dollars just to launch to your users.

Haha, ok sorry. Substitute that with 800 BTC.

I don't know of any plans for that, but I think it'd be nice as well but technically pretty challenging. They'd all at least have to be using the same implementation. Going from like a Greenlight to LND would be very challenging if its even possible. So there's have to be some sort of standard there.

Potentially.... We have our own LSP, Flow 2.0, that provides liquidity to mobile nodes. If you are meaning about letting our customer be their own LSPs, yeah it's a possibility and something like Dunder could work there.

If we're thinking about this strictly from liquidity, More of the second in my view. I don't think it will be winner-take-most, I believe there will be a fairly diverse set.

If we're talking about a more general Lightning provider, I think we'd still see a decent group of offerings that focus in specific areas or types of solutions.

I don't think I have a direct answer to this question. It all depends on a lot of factors. Generally speaking with our customers we have no fees or incredibly low fees on private channels because these are generally end users of a noncustodial mobile wallet.

I think in 2024 we'll see more of large new players in providing liquidity. There's definitely interest from folks about this. I think the challenging part is the demand side. If we had $20 million dollars of liquidity pop into Magma (or other service) tomorrow would it get used up? It'd take a while to actually get that deployed out. To counter argue myself, I think demand will increase as well in the coming year+.

Yeah, we've seen a fairly large increase in builders using LDK from Spiral. I think there will continue to be more of this in the coming years.

Yeah good call out, LSP Spec is a giant win for self custody services.

The obvious benefit to the spec is easier integrations for wallet or system builders into LSPs. Of course it will be positive when it becomes completely integrated across the ecosystem. Second-order effects could likely be more participation from new players in providing liquidity. More LSPs, more liquidity, etc.

I don't think anyone has created a direct comparison you're asking for in #1. If you are asking about liquidity services only it's a little easier to compare side by side. However if you are talking about company's products overall it's more challenging to compare all providers side by side regarding fees and such

Marketplaces help in diversifying your liquidity in addition to an LSP.

I think they will definitely still exist and be very helpful. Ideally they'd adopt the spec as well.

Sure! So at @voltage_cloud, we're an infrastructure provider for Bitcoin. That means we provide everything you need to build & use Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. We provide infrastructure (node hosting & management), connectivity (Liquidity Service Providing), analytics (metrics, accounting, insights), and backend services (Esplora, RGS, etc). We help companies incorporate both Bitcoin Layer 1 and Lightning Layer 2 into their products and services. We help folks go from testing and idea to scaling in production very easily.

Hey everyone! Excited to be doing this.

Thanks for the shoutout folks. Dropping our link here for easy reference: https://voltage.cloud