Niftynei sat down with Blockstream’s Christian Decker to discuss Greenlight — an infrastructure tool that enables a service provider to manage a lightning node on behalf of its users, but ensure the users maintain custody of their funds.
Running a Core Lightning node is difficult for the everyday user. Managing infrastructure, ensuring uptime, keeping backups… My head is already hurting writing about it. Traditionally, the alternative to running a full setup is using a completely custodial provider.
Greenlight is an intermediate setup between these two extremes. It provides users an opportunity to leverage self-custodial lightning, while enabling service providers to take care of complex tasks like database management and securing backups. It’s self-custodial, but comes with tradeoffs. For example, a service provider can see the movement of user funds.
As users become more comfortable with managing a lightning node, Greenlight enables them to offboard the lightning node to their own, self-hosted infrastructure.
The conversation with Christian went over the problem space, and design philosophy, for Greenlight. It’s a 20 minute listen. Throw it on during your lunch break!
And devs, check out the Greenlight client library.
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