When I talk to people about getting into lightning infrastructure, i frame it as there are both operational and economic challenges.

On the operational side, you’ve got key management problems, state management problems, and then general networking. There are some unusual concerns around key and state management, but we’ll get there. Theres just a lot of engineering to do.

The economics are really challenging if you want routing to actually be profitable because routing is a race to the bottom. Its very very difficult to make money routing. More people are moving into liquidity provisioning (renting channels). Things are better there but its still hard. In these or any other liquidity services, cost of capital is a real concern because it sets your hurdle rate: how much do you have to make to generate any profit (even before the infrastructure and engineering costs, which are non-trivial if you’re handling real money).