State of Lightning Infrastructure
summary
Cape Crypto reports running a self-hosted stack—ran CLN then LND via gRPC—and wrestles with channel liquidity and rebalancing because sats in channels aren’t immediately usable; Africa Free Routing boots local nodes in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa, sells inbound liquidity (advertised as 10,000 for 1,000,000 sats) and is still recovering after funds were stolen when a VPS was hacked—lost funds after VPS hack. IEX offers an API with funded channels and large onchain liquidity so customers don’t fund channels themselves—IEX supplies funded channels via API—and Lightning Ventures reports 40+ investments and cites ~\$387M BTC TVL for 2024.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:04Panelists and roles
- 3:54Running your own Lightning stack vs cloud services
- 7:29Lightning in Africa
- 14:38Free routing in Africa
- 17:10IEX and Lightning services
- 20:42VC on infrastructure
- 23:12Future of Lightning
- 24:37Centralization risks
- 27:48Self-hosted vs LSP
- 30:58Conclusion and Q&A
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