Use Voltage for Bitcoin Infrastructure

[UncleSamtoshi]

Currently each Galoy instance runs its own LND and bitcoin nodes as pods within a kubernetes cluster. There could be an interesting collaboration with Voltage to use their hosted nodes for each Galoy deployment. I can think of a few benefits and downsides to implementing this.

Benefits:

• Fast Galoy deployments: Currently the bottleneck for spinning up a Galoy instance is syncing our bitcoin node. If we could receive a cached node, we would be able to shorten our initial deployment from multiple days to less than an hour.
• Clearer separation of custody: If Galoy is hosting an instance for an institution, it may be unclear that we are not the custodian of any funds for that instance. By using Voltage, all money moving operations would take place outside of our direct control.
• Improved reliability: Since Voltage is specializing in infrastructure, they can presumably focus on improving their reliability. With LND being one of the more finicky parts of our stack, this could improve our product and reduce our engineering strain.

Downsides:

• Another company to trust: A customer must now trust Voltage with their funds in addition to Galoy.
• Increased deployment complexity: Spinning up a Galoy instance becomes more complicated and less self-contained.
• Difficulty debugging: Since we do not directly control the node, it may be difficult to debug unique issues we face.
• Cost: Voltage has hosting fees.