This is an excellent read! I remember many years ago, hearing Matt Odell say that Lightning wasn't operating in an adversarial environment -- this seems to largely still be true. I'm happy to see people talking about it again.
All this excitement has attracted huge investments. Since 2018, more than half a billion dollars have been raised by Lightning startups from larger companies investing millions into Lightning development every year.But what, exactly, has all this investment produced? A castle of glass. It is magnificent to behold, yet it is dangerously fragile. When the storm comes, it won’t be in one piece for long.The recent wave of security disclosures reveals a worrying reality: the very foundations of the Lightning Network are brittle. These are not isolated bugs but symptoms of a systemic "features-first" development culture. For the Lightning Network to survive and thrive, its architects—from individual developers to major corporations—must shift their focus from building new features to securing the ones we already have. We must move from a features-first to a security-first mindset.