[fangx]

Lightning has always been broken in one way or another.

In the early days of Lightning, users ran nodes at home, which costed $300 in hardware, plus managing channels and liquidity. Way too expensive in terms of both time and money. Mobile wallets like Breez and Phoenix made things easier, but 'offline receive' was unreliable: payments would still fail if your phone was in power-saving mode, had bad reception, or was off the grid. Custodial wallets fixed that, but now you had to give up your keys.

@phlip9 and I got sick of all this and wanted a Lightning wallet that Just Works™ while retaining the self-sovereignty that Bitcoin is all about. After some iterating, we landed on the radical idea of running an entire Lightning node inside a hardware enclave (specifically, Intel SGX) in the cloud. The enclave isolates your node from the operators of the system - we can't read your keys. But because it's hosted, your node stays online 24/7.

This is our first ever public release, still in beta. We'd love to hear your feedback.

[timpan]

What’s the performance like on the SGX?

[fangx]

Some things are extremely slow - getting the current time is literally 1000x slower than on regular Linux. But overall, since we're built on LDK, which is written in Rust, CPU isn't typically our bottleneck. Memory is a bigger problem because we have to store the entire Lightning Network graph in memory, but we amortize this cost across multiple user nodes with our "meganode" architecture.