Lightning Pool Is Open for Business: Lease Liquidity, Earn Returns, Stack Sats

[Charles-Tim]

Today, Lightning Labs announced the release of Pool, “a non-custodial, peer-to-peer marketplace for Lightning node operators to buy and sell access to liquidity,” according to a press release. The service will allow Lightning Network users to lend out bitcoin in payment channels in return for yield. Businesses and services providers can then draw on this liquidity when needed to manage Lightning Network payment flows.

'LiFi': Lightning-native financial services
Lightning Labs is marketing the service as a flagship for Lightning Finance or “LiFi,” a way for Bitcoiners to generate non-custodial yield on their bitcoin holdings, as opposed to lending them through a custodian like BlockFi or turning them into wrapped bitcoin for DeFi yield farming.

The service has been in a closed alpha with “many of the major exchanges, wallets, and service providers testing this in the background and to make sure it has enough liquidity on it when it launches.” The maximum order amount at launch will be 10 BTC, though Lightning Labs will raise this in the future once the platform has been sufficiently stress tested.

“In our general style of being more cautious, right now the max account size is 10 BTC. Pool is still early and this isn’t DeFi; we don’t want them depositing a million dollars from day one.”

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-lightning-network-payment-channel-liquidity

Popular Lightning services like Strike have already encountered surges of demand that required them to quickly open channels in order to onboard new customers. Using Pool, node operators can now be paid for opening up new channels and providing inbound liquidity. This opens the door to new sources of revenue for leasing out liquidity and deploying capital on Lightning. Pool provides an even greater benefit for new participants such as merchants and Lightning developers bootstrapping their liquidity when they first join the network.

To get started and knowing more about Lightning Pool
https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-11-02-lightning-pool/

[erikoy]

This could change the financial sector services if being adapted. We know that bitcoin is money and it only needed a good network for a good operational services and it will be more efficient and effective with fast p2p network. Hope many could see this great advancement of bitcoin technology. Anyway, thanks for the share OP.  This could mean a lot to the members that are using in their daily life expenses or whatsoever bitcoin business they had.

[NotATether]

I’m not going to pretend to be a LN expert but how many LN nodes do we even have in total? I think we should be deploying more nodes before working on ways to balance things like channels (most of the article went over my head). We have a little over 10,000 full nodes continuously online and I’m guessing there are 50x or 100x less active LN nodes so we should be more focused on getting more nodes running and finalizing the Lightning Network’s spec before we jump into technology built around LN.

[buwaytress]

Nothing like the 2017-level congestion to return the interest to Lightning pools!

Might do with a risk assessment (as in, what's the risk of losing your loan here?). Interesting that they've got major exchanges and wallets in on the closed alpha when they were reluctant as it is to even upgrade to segwit. Seeing a lot of love from exchanges to get onto second layers.

[Carlton Banks]

I'm noticing this only works with lnd atm (which LightningLabs develop).

Boltz is better for buying incoming channels; the server code is open source (eg. LLabs Lightning Loop server code was famously closed source code), and it works with other lightning clients. And the concept of "leasing" sounds appalling on an open network; the node who opens a channel to you is gaining something if someone routes through the channel, as their node is necessarily part of the route.

Better still would be negotiating this all across the LN itself, in a fully decentralized way. I imagine the various 3rd layer tech will eventually provide such possibilities.

[Charles-Tim]

Lightning Labs’ new liquidity marketplace, Lightning Pool, has seen more early-stage growth than its creators expected. And what’s more, a fair share of its volume is coming from individual Lightning users – not businesses. Since launch, Lightning Pool has facilitated over 11.5 BTC in orders (worth just over $208,000). According to data from a community-built Lightning Pool tweet bot, the service has several dozen active users (Lightning Labs declined to give an exact figure).

https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-network-liquidity-pool-surprising-mix