Today, we're excited to announce the latest release of Lightning Pool with a number of new features requested by our users. Lightning Pool is a non-custodial, peer-to-peer marketplace for Lightning node operators to buy and sell channels. With Pool, Lightning developers and node operators can streamline their channel management and focus on serving their customers instead of worrying about liquidity. When node operators can more efficiently deploy their capital, it improves the network as a whole, making it more reliable and resilient for everyone.

With today's update, we're making improvements to lower Pool costs and increase profitability for Pool users. These new features include longer channel lease durations, improving the account maintenance, and stronger assurances to lease duration enforcement. Users can access these new features on Lightning Terminal, our web-based node management interface.

Longer Lease Durations

Pool users often request longer channel lease duration options in addition to the existing two week option. As a result, we're adding lease durations of 4 weeks, 12 weeks, and 1 year based on block time. This change will lower costs for Pool users by reducing the number of necessary on-chain transactions. We look forward to customer feedback and observing the longer duration yield curve.

Stronger Lease Enforcement

Pool channel leases are now enforced with Bitcoin's smart contracting language: Script. This upgrade ensures that lease sellers will complete the duration of their lease commitment. For channels of this type, the channel initiator must wait for the channel lease maturity, expressed as an absolute height of the chain, to be met before being able to sweep their funds.

Account Setup + Maintenance Improvements 

We've enhanced how Pool customers interact in the market in order to reduce the cost of participation and maintaining an account. Users will now be able to keep more of their earned yield and the cost to lease a channel will be even lower. Users participating in the Pool market no longer incur cost to maintain an account. Further, we've added a feature, client-side account recovery, to enable users to recover their accounts in the event Pool servers were to go offline for a prolonged period of time -- trust minimization at work!

Future Work

We will continue to work to improve Lightning Pool to deliver the best possible experience to our users. In the future, we're looking to leverage the transaction and privacy savings of Taproot within Pool. As always, we love to hear from our community, so reach out on Twitter or join our developer Slack to let us know what you think, get help, or ask questions.