Lightning Network Daemon

The Lightning Network Daemon (lnd) - is a complete implementation of a Lightning Network node and currently deployed on testnet3 - the Bitcoin Test Network. lnd has several pluggable back-end chain services including btcd (a full-node) and neutrino (a new experimental light client). The project's codebase uses the btcsuite set of Bitcoin libraries, and also exports a large set of isolated re-usable Lightning Network related libraries within it. In the current state lnd is capable of:

• Creating channels.
• Closing channels.
• Completely managing all channel states (including the exceptional ones!).
• Maintaining a fully authenticated+validated channel graph.
• Performing path finding within the network, passively forwarding incoming payments.
• Sending outgoing onion-encrypted payments through the network.
• Updating advertised fee schedules.
• Automatic channel management (autopilot).

Lightning Network Specification Compliance

lnd doesn't yet fully conform to the Lightning Network specification (BOLTs). BOLT stands for: Basic of Lightning Technologies. The specifications are currently being drafted by several groups of implementers based around the world including the developers of lnd. The set of specification documents as well as our implementation of the specification are still a work-in-progress. With that said, lnd the current status of lnd's BOLT compliance is:

• BOLT 1: Base Protocol
• BOLT 2: Peer Protocol for Channel Management
  • lnd has not yet integrated full channel re-transmission upon reconnection
• BOLT 3: Bitcoin Transaction and Script Formats
• BOLT 4: Onion Routing Protocol
• BOLT 5: Recommendations for On-chain Transaction Handling
• BOLT 7: P2P Node and Channel Discovery
• BOLT 8: Encrypted and Authenticated Transport

Developer Resources

The daemon has been designed to be as developer friendly as possible in order to facilitate application development on top of lnd. Two primary RPC interfaces are exported: an HTTP REST API, and a gRPC service. The exported API's are not yet stable, so be warned: they may change drastically in the near future.

An automatically generated set of documentation for the RPC APIs can be found at api.lightning.community. A set of developer resources including talks, articles, and example applications can be found at: dev.lightning.community.

Finally, we also have an active Slack where protocol developers, application developers, testers and users gather to discuss various aspects of lnd and also Lightning in general.

Installation

In order to build from source, please see the installation instructions.

IRC

• irc.freenode.net
• channel #lnd
• webchat

Further reading

• Step-by-step send payment guide with docker
• Contribution guide