Lightning Pool: A Technical Deep-Dive
Today we’re excited to announce our alpha release of Lightning Pool a new non-custodial marketplace that connects people who want to buy inbound liquidity with those looking to earn a return on their bitcoin in Lightning channels, promoting more efficient capital allocation on the Lightning Network. In this post, we’ll be doing a deep-dive into the architecture and design of the marketplace. This marketplace has two natural sides: Taker Maker Description Nodes that need to receive funds over…
Announcing the Newest Feature in Faraday: Track Your Sats with Accounting for LND!
Today, we’re excited to announce the latest release of Faraday, which now includes full accounting reports to keep track of your sats with lnd. This is the second feature in Faraday’s suite of tools to help routing nodes and businesses run on Lightning. It’s been great to watch the community build and explore new use cases on the foundation of lnd. From financial services to in-game micropayments, the foundation for a Lightning-powered economy is emerging. As a company building services like…
Announcing lnd 0.11-beta: Let's Get Ready to Wumbo!
We’ve come a long way since the early #craeful days of the Lightning Network. When building, tinkering, and experimenting, we’ve always encouraged the community to use caution when using the network. To keep your funds safu, Lightning channel sizes were limited to a maximum of 0.1677 BTC. After two years of hard work and extensive testing from the community, we have reached a point where we feel comfortable removing these constraints for those who want larger channels. With this release of lnd v…
It's LiT! Announcing Lightning Terminal: Your Home for Lightning Liquidity
Today we’re releasing a new browser-based, self-hosted dashboard for Lightning Labs products: Lightning Terminal. Initially, Lightning Terminal is focused on making it easier to manage channels using Lightning Loop. This is the first of several features that will enable new use cases and open the door to new possibilities with Lightning and with bitcoin. We hope that providing a more visual interaction with Lightning Labs products will make our technology more accessible and intuitive for all…
Announcing Lightning Multi-Loop: Upgrading Lightning Loop with Multi-Path Payments
Today we're happy to announce that the recent release of LND 0.10.0 has enabled Lightning Labs to release the first major upgrade for Lightning Loop since its beta release: multi-path Loop support. As Loop is a non-custodial service that translates Lightning off-chain funds to blockchain on-chain funds, it is specifically designed to service amounts suitable for the Blockchain that are larger and aggregate many off-chain micropayments. To scale this value up we're adding support for Loop users…
Multi-Path Payments in LND: Making Channel Balances Add Up
With the release of LND 0.10, one of the most highly anticipated features of Lightning was brought to completion. After an extensive specification and implementation process, we are pleased to announce that LND now fully supports multi-path payments. In prior versions, every successful payment was accomplished through exactly one successful HTLC: one HTLC, one route, and the full payment amount delivered atomically to the recipient. Simple, fast, but not the optimal way to utilize committed…
Announcing lnd v0.10-beta!
We at Lightning Labs hope that everyone is staying in good health. We’re grateful that the Lightning and Bitcoin communities live online in a way that allows us to continue contributing and building remotely. Today we’re excited to release the latest culmination of that worldwide effort, lnd v0.10-beta! As always, we’ve included a brief list of the highlights below, with more information included in the release notes. Multi-Path Payments When we released lnd v0.9-beta back in January 2020, we…
Announcing Faraday: Tame your Lightning Node with Close Recommendations
Today running a Lightning Network node presents operators with a series of tradeoffs and operational requirements. Nobody said building the future of financial infrastructure would be easy, after all. Two tasks in particular seem to dominate: liquidity management and channel management. The objective of liquidity management is to ensure that a node has enough capacity to send and receive funds. Channel management concerns the opening and closing of channels, to ensure that a node is sufficiently connected to the network, and its capital is efficiently allocated.
LSAT: Authentication and Payments for the Lightning-Native Web
Today we’re excited to announce the release of our draft of a specification for Lightning Service Authentication Tokens (LSAT). LSAT is a new protocol standard for authentication and paid APIs (using the Internet’s preferred currency: sats!) developed by Lightning Labs which leverages the widely underused HTTP 402 (payment required) status code. LSATs can serve both as authentication, as well as a payment mechanism (one can view it as a ticket of sorts) for paid APIs. By leveraging LSATs, a service or business is able to offer a new tier of paid APIs that sits between free and subscription: metered, with no login, email or passwords required! Alongside this specification, we’re also releasing Aperture, our implementation of an HTTP-402 (Payment Required) LSAT reverse proxy which is used in production today by Lightning Loop. Aperture can be used to easily create a new LSAT-aware paid API or service, and even seamlessly upgrade an existing web resource or API to make it LSAT-enabled, creating a portal from the existing web to the new Lightning-native web.
Announcing Lightning Loop Beta: An On and Off Ramp for the Lightning Network
We’re excited to announce the release of the Lightning Loop Beta. Loop is a service that makes it easier to send and receive funds on Lightning, serving as an on and off ramp between the Lightning Network and the Bitcoin blockchain. This release brings substantial improvements including batching (for on-chain fee efficiency), time preference-based discounts, volume discounts, authentication tokens, a more complete developer API, improved stability, and increased limits for Loop transactions.