The first globally recognised country that switches over to the lightning network will win in so many ways that will have a profound impact decades into the future.

If a large globally recognised nation made lightning the countries main payments rail and made bitcoin untaxed legal tender it would make the rest of the worlds "advanced" economies look like they use broken 50 year old financial technologies by comparison.

Take Singapore as an example.

Singapore does not tax bitcoin as they have no capital gains tax at all already. If their financial sector decided to start running the countries economy on lightning rails instead of NETS, PayNow, Visa, MasterCard, ACH, SWIFT, RTGS etc they would look lightyears ahead relative to other countries.

Every bank, every fintech app, every merchant, every business, every government department and every individual in the country would be interoperable out of the box. All able to transfer money between each other instantly for free and securely with final settlement in one second.

Any tourist visiting the country could download a lightning wallet and load it with sats at the airports currency exchange desks and become instantly interoperable with every business and individual inside Singapore giving them the same interoperability and financial abilities as any local citizen. From paying for Taxi's to 4G data to food delivery to hotels, tourists could pay for it all with any lightning app they want, no more messing around with cash and travel cards and ATMs everywhere.

Then once a country like Singapore does this it makes other neighbouring countries like Australia, Japan and Korea look like they are 50 years behind. At this point financial innovation, wealth management and fintech businesses would flood into Singapore to make it their home base as it will be the easiest place on earth to do anything financial.

The first mover wins big time and any country that takes even a few extra years to follow suit loses massively.