How can c= generate such a return with just routing?
Lightning liquidity is the most underestimated part of the network.
It’s part of what we solve at moneydevkit, but here’s a bit about how we did it at Block
1. Real transactions.
Cash is one of the biggest lightning services on the network. It connects millions to lightning, and as Miles pointed out, more and more people are using it everyday.
By nature of cash being custodial, we had insights into what people were using lightning for. This was part of the original thesis of c=.
There are some big players out there that node runners have no idea about 🤷🏻♂️. Lightning privacy works very well. Apologies monero trolls.
2. Liquidity in our favor
Most people buy bitcoin on cashapp and withdraw (based)
That transaction flow is ideal for lightning, and in the right hands, you can flex it to pay for and make a handsome return on your own payments and operations.
For the plebnet inclined— c= is an inbound generator. For its capacity it’s typically had 1-3X+ more inbound than outbound. This is a very unique position on the network.
3. Strategy
The management the team did not only improved the experience for Cash users, it compounded payments and fees going through our channels.
We expected to get some return, but we were pretty blown away by the volumes and takes.
The ROI we collected was not from Cash.
This was just step 0.5. The next steps were to flex our position and liquidity to bolster bigger and higher value things. One of those was Square.
In the end, the real value comes from real people making real payments. It’s why I’ve always harped on this:
We don’t need X protocol or Y L2. The technology is there. We need to do the hard part of bringing it to real people now.
For you nostr folks consider— on-chain fees were never even a thought in our minds. Our margins were fat.
