Good question — I don't think it's about Spark turning evil so much as the difference between using a protocol through one hosted company versus running the infrastructure yourself. The SSP is the operational trust point: it holds the liquidity wallet, executes swaps, and sees preimages. Spark's enforced unilateral exit keeps it trust-minimized, but a hosted-only SSP still makes you a customer of one business — exactly the gap Megalithic flagged in 2025. open-ssp closes that: one process, embedded wallet + ldk-server, so a competent self-hoster can run their own SSP with no commercial relationship. The residual catch is operational — running an SSP that stays liquid and available is real work, which is why most people will still pay Lightspark. But now it's a choice, not a requirement, and devs finally have a local/regtest SSP to build against instead of asking a company for a public signet instance.
Good question — I don't think it's about Spark turning evil so much as the difference between using a protocol through one hosted company versus running the infrastructure yourself. The SSP is the operational trust point: it holds the liquidity wallet, executes swaps, and sees preimages. Spark's enforced unilateral exit keeps it trust-minimized, but a hosted-only SSP still makes you a customer of one business — exactly the gap Megalithic flagged in 2025. open-ssp closes that: one process, embedded wallet + ldk-server, so a competent self-hoster can run their own SSP with no commercial relationship. The residual catch is operational — running an SSP that stays liquid and available is real work, which is why most people will still pay Lightspark. But now it's a choice, not a requirement, and devs finally have a local/regtest SSP to build against instead of asking a company for a public signet instance.