What’s going on with bitcoin and lightning in 2025? When did shadow custodian become self-custody? I know 2024 was rough but it’s a new year and it’s time for self-custody to make a comeback.
Some thoughts below on how to make that happen, and a tweet thread for those of you who can’t read.

sats.build
Building Self Custody Lightning in 2025
It's time to start building the bitcoin ecosystem we started in 2023 and never got to finish.
What spawned this? 2024 was a rough year for Bitcoin. We literally lost a year.
Regulatory was one thing, but tech was a whole other story. Lightning developer brethren, when did we give up and accept shadow custody over self-custody? smh
Ecash and liquid are custodians with extra steps. S/o to
@calle for being the most intellectually honest out of all the ecashers.
Instead of retreating to custodial solutions, double down with me and try a little harder. I can’t defend ecash or federation mumbojumbo. I can absolutely stand behind an LSP.
The details are in the post, but the gist is this– we don’t need 100% off-chain yet. NFTs lost (again). We have not pushed the Bitcoin blockchain to the point of needing to scale (yet, but if we make a compelling Bitcoin payments application, maybe we’ll actually have a reason to). We don’t need op_codes we need thoughtful design.
I’m thinking of building this, but in the spirit of Bitcoin, Satoshi’s vision etc. I want you to think of building this too. Maybe we can do it together?