Lightning Channel Optimizer

Lightning Channel Optimizer applies network analyses for choosing which nodes to set up payment channels with.

Introduction

When a new user joins the Lightning Network, they must decide which nodes to set up payment channels with. Currently, this is done manually by directly connecting to a shop or user you're already familiar with, or by going on to a website such as https://1ml.com and finding a node with many connections. However, if the Lightning Network is to scale and become a widely adopted payment solution for merchants for example, they will need a better way of selecting nodes to connect to.

Solution

The Lightning Channel Optimizer is a tool to help users find well connected nodes to form payment channels with. It runs in Jupyter Notebook and interacts with the command line interface for the c-lightning implementation. The tool performs three main steps:

1. Gets data from the Lightning Network

It retreives all the active nodes and payment channels and returns the main graph using the Networkx python library.

2. Suggests nodes to connect

It will suggest a pre-specified numner of nodes to connect to which will maximize either the user's closeness or betweenness, based on their preferences. The suggested payment channels are visualized, as well as the node's predicted measures of closeness and betweenness if they were to go ahead and set up these payment channels.

3. Set up payment channels

The tool produces the commands which are executed by the c-lightning command line interface to set up and fund the new payment channels.

Example

Demo video

Youtube link

Presentation slides

Google slides