Blogs & Articles: Breez Partners with bolt.observer: Growing Businesses in a Thriving Lightning Ecosystem 🔗 1 year ago

I recently wrote about how Lightning is maturing, which is apparent in the proliferation of vertically differentiated Lightning businesses. We used to be “just” a community, but we’re growing into an industry.

And just like any industry draws on the inputs of several others, each company in a thriving industry will exchange products, services, and value with other companies in that industry. That’s the appeal of the “ecosystem” metaphor: the vitality of any organism/company or species/industry depends on the vitality of others.

A solitary plant needs lots of external support to survive, but out in the wild, with others, it can thrive. (Images: Mark & LariKoze)

Let me give you a peek into our little corner of the Lightning ecosystem by explaining what we do, what bolt.observer does, and how we’re fostering each other’s growth and vitality.

Lightning Depends on Liquidity Management Depends on Node Management

There’s a lot to Breez beyond what the user sees. The app is just one part of it. There are also activities like devops, research, support, and — crucially — making sure our node is well connected and well funded with balanced channels, which largely happen behind the scenes.

Node management is one area that’s especially invisible to users (if done properly) and especially vital. After all, Lightning is a network, and our node is our connection to it. It’s how we connect to our users and how we connect our users to all the others on the network they want to transact with. Just as importantly, we have a lot of liquidity — money! — parked there, moving back and forth to and from our counterparties.

We have hundreds of routing-node counterparties. We could have millions of sats spread across several channels with each one. We’re constantly opening, closing, rebalancing, and optimizing channels. This is the central activity in operating any LSP, and Breez is no exception.

As I’ve said before, in order to be a better payment network, Lightning needs to do better at allocating liquidity. All that’s required is for each individual node to take liquidity seriously and to optimize their local operation accordingly. If all routing nodes optimize for throughput individually, the network will grow, and we’ll all benefit collectively.

To be economical, we as a company need to keep all these plates balanced and spinning at exactly the right RPMs.

Node management simulation game. (Image: Miroslav Polča)

That’s why we’ve partnered with bolt.observer. The great team behind bolt.observer first appeared on our radar about a year ago. Our homegrown node-management tools needed to scale with our business. As one of the bigger LSPs on the network with several big public channels and literally thousands of private channels, we need advanced tools to manage our node.

Specifically, we wanted to:

• Receive notifications when our outbound liquidity to particular nodes drop below threshold values over any number of shared channels
• Receive notifications about the state of inbound liquidity with particular services
• Monitor selected private channels.

We’ve worked with the bolt.observer team to make sure their newest offering, LiquidOps, meets our requirements and allows us to monitor liquidity in our channels and to configure advanced alerting options for various scenarios. It’s a match made in heaven.

With bolt.observer’s help, we have improved our node management, which has improved the reliability and robustness of our LSP, which has improved the UX for our thousands of users (and channel partners), which strengthens and invigorates the network, which is good for bitcoin, which is good for the world.

Breez + bolt.observer ➡ mainstreaming Lightning ➡ global bitcoin adoption ➡ better world. I’m only half joking. (Image: Wikimedia)

Symbiosis at Work

Our partnership with bolt.observer is exactly how to build a thriving ecosystem.

We could have tried to improve our node-management tool in-house. We could have tried to keep maintaining and updating it. We could have even tried to spin it off or market it to other LSPs and become a Lightning hegemon.

But bolt.observer is doing a better job than we could. They’re making our lives easier and letting us focus on our core business of building a frictionless interface to the Lightning economy. Aljaz and his team are kindred bitcoin spirits who recognized an itch we and many others share, and they’ve built a valuable solution that scratches it better with every update. And when you work with great, smart, like-minded people, it doesn’t really matter what logo is on the website or where they pay their taxes.

Are they colleagues, partners, comrades in the global bitcoin campaign, or are they pals?

All of the above.

This is how it’s supposed to work.

Breez Partners with bolt.observer: Growing Businesses in a Thriving Lightning Ecosystem was originally published in Breez Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.