Hosting lightning node and non-custodial In Bitcoin we can have a light wallet where we are connected to a full node, by doing this, we have to trust that the full node is feeding correct information, but at least we can store our keys in the light wallet itself.

I've been looking around for a similar solution in lightning and the closest I found are some lightning wallets which host a node in their clouds and an app which controls the node.

Unlike layer 1, keys are not needed in order to perform transactions, which means that you are not only trusting the information the node is providing, also they could perform transactions without your knowledge.

Am I missing something here? Why are those wallets called non-custodial?

I know you can run a full lightning node on you phone like acinq does, but a safe cloud-based solution would lower the barrier of entry for some users
Unlike layer 1, keys are not needed in order to perform transactions, which means that you are not only trusting the information the node is providing, also they could perform transactions without your knowledge.


Keys are required in lightning. Multiple, in fact.

The lightning node itself is identified by its public key. You need the private key to perform the secure handshake so that you can have encrypted and authenticated communication with peers. You also need the node's private key to sign any gossip information about your node or channels.

On forming channels, you need the private key for an unspent transaction output on the bitcoin network in order to fund the channel.

On operating channels, each channel has a unique funding key which is used to spend the 2-of-2 P2WSH output. You must have the corresponding private key to sign each commitment transaction and also the closing transaction - this must be done once per commitment.