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Pool

Welcome to the API reference documentation for Lightning Pool.

Lightning Pool is a non-custodial batched uniform clearing-price auction for Lightning Channel Lease (LCL). A LCL packages up inbound (or outbound!) channel liquidity (ability to send/receive funds) as a fixed incoming asset (earning interest over time) with a maturity date expressed in blocks. The maturity date of each of the channels is enforced by Bitcoin contracts, ensuring that the funds of the maker (the party that sold the channel) can't be swept until the maturity height. All cleared orders (purchased channels) are cleared in a single batched on-chain transaction.

This repository is home to the Pool client and depends on the Lightning Network daemon lnd. All of lnd’s supported chain backends are fully supported when using the Pool client: Neutrino, Bitcoin Core, and btcd.

The service can be used in various situations:

  • Bootstrapping new users with side car channels
  • Bootstrapping new services to Lightning
  • Demand fueled routing node channel selection
  • Allowing users to instantly receive with a wallet

Usage​

Learn how to install, configure, and use Pool by viewing the documentation in the Builder's Guide.

Summary​

This site features the documentation for pool (CLI), and the API documentation for Python and JavaScript clients in order to communicate with a local poold instance through gRPC.

gRPC​

The code samples assume that the there is a local poold instance running and listening for gRPC connections on port 12010. POOL_DIR will be used as a placeholder to denote the base directory of the poold instance. By default, this is ~/.pool on Linux and ~/Library/Application Support/Pool on macOS.

At the time of writing this documentation, two things are needed in order to make a gRPC request to an poold instance: a TLS/SSL connection and a macaroon used for RPC authentication. The code samples will show how these can be used in order to make a successful, secure, and authenticated gRPC request.

The original *.proto files from which the gRPC documentation was generated can be found here:

REST​

View a listing of all REST URLs on the REST Endpoints page.

The code samples assume that the there is a local poold instance running and listening for REST connections on port 8281. POOL_DIR will be used as a placeholder to denote the base directory of the poold instance. By default, this is ~/.pool on Linux and ~/Library/Application Support/Pool on macOS.

At the time of writing this documentation, two things are needed in order to make an HTTP request to an poold instance: a TLS/SSL connection and a macaroon used for RPC authentication. The code samples will show how these can be used in order to make a successful, secure, and authenticated HTTP request.

The original *.swagger.json files from which the gRPC documentation was generated can be found here:

REST Encoding​

NOTE: The byte field type must be set as the base64 encoded string representation of a raw byte array. Also, any time this must be used in a URL path (ie. /v1/abc/xyz/{payment_hash}) the base64 string must be encoded using a URL and Filename Safe Alphabet. This means you must replace + with -, / with _, and keep the trailing = as is. Url encoding (ie. %2F) will not work.

This documentation was generated automatically against commit 1a96134823ed0287d71c20d4ccdf5dd4f40cbdcf.