Builder's Guide
  • Welcome to the Builder's Guide to the LND Galaxy!
  • The Lightning Network
    • Overview
    • Payment Channels
      • Lifecycle of a Payment Channel
      • Watchtowers
      • Understanding Sweeping
      • Etymology
    • The Gossip Network
      • Identifying Good Peers on the Lightning Network
    • Pathfinding
      • Finding routes in the Lightning Network
      • Channel Fees
      • Multipath Payments (MPP)
    • Lightning Network Invoices
      • Understanding Lightning Invoices
    • Making Payments
      • The Payment Cycle
      • Timelocks
      • ⭐Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC)
      • Payment Etymology
      • ⭐What Makes a Good Routing Node
      • Understanding Submarine Swaps
      • Instant Submarine Swaps
    • Liquidity
      • ⭐Understanding Liquidity
      • Managing Liquidity on the Lightning Network
      • Liquidity Management for Lightning Merchants
      • How to Get Inbound Capacity on the Lightning Network
      • Lightning Service Provider
    • L402: Lightning HTTP 402 Protocol
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    • Taproot Assets
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      • lnd.conf
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      • Wallet Management
      • Sending Payments
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      • Channel Fees
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      • Macaroons
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      • Bulk onchain actions with PSBTs
      • Sweeper
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      • Fuzzing LND
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    • Lightning Terminal
      • What is Lightning Terminal?
      • 🛠️Get litd
      • Run litd
      • Integrating litd
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      • Recommended Channels
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      • Opening Lightning Network Channels
      • Managing Channel Liquidity
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      • The Loop CLI
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    • Pool
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    • Taproot Assets
      • Get Started
      • First Steps
      • Taproot Assets Channels
      • Asset Decimal Display
      • Become an Edge Node
      • RFQ
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      • Asset Loop
      • Debugging Tapd
      • Multisignature
      • Minting Assets With an External Signer
      • Lightning Polar
      • Operational Safety Guidelines
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    • Aperture
      • ⚒️Get Aperture
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      • The Faraday CLI
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  • LAPPs
    • Guides
      • Use Polar to Build Your First LAPP
        • Setup: Local Cluster with Polar
        • Setup: Run the Completed App
        • Setup: Run the App Without LND
      • Add Features
        • Feature 1: Connect to LND
        • Feature 2: Display Node Alias and Balance
        • Feature 3: Sign and Verify Posts
        • Feature 4: Modify Upvote Action
      • Make Your own LNC-powered Application
    • Next Steps
  • Community Resources
    • Resource List
    • Lightning Bulb 💡
    • Glossary
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On this page
  • Why Lightning Channels are important
  • How to find good peers
  • How to open a Lightning Network channel
  • Find a good peer

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  1. Lightning Network Tools
  2. Lightning Terminal

Opening Lightning Network Channels

You will need to open channels to be able to receive or send money in the Lightning Network.

PreviousLiquidity ReportNextManaging Channel Liquidity

Last updated 17 days ago

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On the Lightning Network, money moves from sender to receiver through payment channels. These channels are 2-of-2 multisignature contracts with bitcoin held cooperatively by two peers running Lightning Network nodes.

The network today consists of tens of thousands of payment channels connected by thousands of nodes. All payments on the network move from one node to another by shifting the balance of liquidity within one or more channels.

Why Lightning Channels are important

Therefore, every active node on the Lightning Network must have at least one open channel to send or receive payments, and most active routing nodes have many. As nodes open new channels, they become better connected on the Lightning Network. Increased connectivity helps nodes route payments to and from more nodes with lower fees. Sufficient liquidity, meaning the ability to send, receive and route, is an important condition to making these payments work.

The first step to opening a Lightning Network channel is identifying a good peer.

How to find good peers

Good peers on the Lightning Network are nodes that are well connected to the rest of the network and maintain a high level of uptime. In most cases, the number of channels your node has with good peers is more important than the total number of channels it has. Well connected peers increase your chances of being able to successfully route payments on the Lightning Network.

Finding and connecting with good peers is now easier than ever on Lightning Terminal. Once you have connected your node, Terminal will suggest to connect with depending on the number of open channels your node has.

How to open a Lightning Network channel

To open a channel on the Lightning Network, you will first need bitcoin. Your Lightning nodes can provide you with an address to receive bitcoin.

For example, on Umbrel, users can click the Bitcoin tab in the dashboard, click deposit, and send bitcoin to their Umbrel node’s bitcoin address.

Once your node has been funded, you will be able to use Terminal to open a channel with any other Lightning node on the network, as long as it is reachable and accepts your channel request.

As long as your node is available, other nodes on the Lightning Network will also be able to open channels with you.

Most node solutions create a public node by default, which is one that can be viewed on the Lightning Network graph and used as a routing node for passing payments through the network.

By opening channels with many different nodes, a node operator can improve their ability to route payments across the network. This is just one of a few important indicators of a healthy node.

Find a good peer

The relentless competition between nodes and the fluctuating balance of payments between nodes makes it impossible to know exactly which channels are optimal for earning routing fee revenue at any given time.

After all, if it were possible to predict exactly which channels would produce outsized earnings for routing nodes, those opportunities would quickly attract competing nodes with larger channels, more connections, and lower fees until the opportunities disappeared.

Permissionless competition and unpredictable payments help level the playing field for all nodes, rewarding experimentation and good liquidity management.

While the importance of trial and error when adding new channels cannot be overstated, Terminal does have a channel recommendation feature that can help finding peers to open channels with in a way that is beneficial to your node, the peer, and the network as a whole.

recommended channels
Learn more about how to identify good peers.
Learn more about what makes a good routing node.
Click here for a more detailed explanation of good liquidity management on the Lightning Network.
Understand how to best utilize recommended channels.
The Open Channel user interface