68 sats \ 1 reply \ @JohnCantrell97 OP 20 Jul 2022 \ parent \ on: I'm John Cantrell, entrepreneur, spiral grantee, and creator of Sensei. AMA bitcoin
Once VLS is integrated it's probably a workable solution if you need to be non-custodial. The problem is that the partner orgs would still need to run some kind of long-running daemon (the signer) so if they can do that they probably can just run their own CLN/LND node.
I guess once some of the LSP functionality lands in Sensei then there might be an argument that you could essentially manage liquidity for their nodes for them without them needing to deal with it. They'd still need to run the signer though.
I'm not a lawyer but it's also possible even running Sensei in custodial mode (keys are in memory on the machine) might not count as custodial in the legal sense. You can set it up so they still log in with their own username/passphrase and this passphrase encrypts the seed on disk so you never have direct access to it. This is the voltage model and they largely claim to the non-custodial (as far as I know).
I guess it largely depends on the exact requirements?
That's a good point on the signer.
I believe what I've heard Graham and Nate from Voltage both say, and what is listed in one of their blogs Nate wrote, is that they are a "non-custodial, but not trustless" service.
Ultimately, we serve over 14,000 organizations worldwide with a native mobile app on Apple, Android, and in some cases tvOS and Roku. It'd be great to turn on a Lightning interface in our ~100 million apps currently installed on peoples' phones around the world. So they could not only donate Bitcoin to the orgs whose apps they've downloaded, but be interoperable with any other Bitcoin + Lightning wallets for p2p.
On the non-custodial side, it'd just be nice to do this in the spirit of Bitcoin's original ethos. But we would also have to balance the need for nonprofits to issue tax docs for deductions from the donations if their jurisdiction allows for that. As well as their need for liquidity.
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