I’m trying to understand a Lightning routing fee that doesn’t make sense to me right now, and I’m hoping someone here can explain it.
I sent a payment where the recipient received exactly 5,000 sats.
The total amount sent including fee was ~5,040.07 sats.
Here is the path according to ZeusLN wallet (simplified):Here is the path according to ZeusLN wallet (simplified):
me → Stacker.news → Megalitchic.me → MegalithLSP → lsp → LNBig → recipient
Stacker.news forwarded ~5014 with fee 26.07 sats
Now here’s the confusing part.
When I check the channel policy on the Stacker.news hop, it shows:
fee rate: 0.1111% (1111 ppm)
base fee: 0.1 sat
With that policy, on ~5,000 sats I’d expect a fee of ~5–6 sats, not 26.07 sats.
As far as I understand, each hop always applies its own fee policy and cannot exceed it.
The 26.07 sats is shown explicitly as the fee at the Stacker.news hop, not the total route fee.
How can a node with a fee rate of 1111 ppm and a base fee of 0.1 sat end up charging 26.07 sats on a ~5,000 sat payment?
If there’s something subtle here I’d genuinely like to understand it.
Right now, from the numbers alone, this looks extremely misleading at best.
Can someone explain what’s actually happening here?
Are you really checking the policy between Stacker.news and Megalithic.me? When did you check the channel policy? Maybe it changed after you made the payment. Maybe your state of the graph was outdated.
oh hell I had assumed I needed look at the fee policy for the channel between myself and Stacker.news, but I’ve now realized that the relevant policy is actually on the next hop, between Stacker.news and Megalithic.me, which takes 5000 ppm accroding to amboss and it makes sense it takes 26 sats.
Maybe because SN is using a LNproxy for the zaps through SN and charge the sybil fee for posting on SN.
You didn't mention if this payment was a zap on SN, or a regular payment but your node took the path through SN node.
It was not a zap. It was a regular payment.
I have a private channel with the Stacker.news node, and when I sent the payment, I explicitly selected the Stacker.news channel as the first hop.
Then maybe SN node understand that regular payment as a zap on SN and charged the SN fee for zaps. I see this as the only explanation of that high fee.
Hm.. I don’t understand how LN node could interpret an incoming htlc as a zap and silently charge an application-level fee.
Maybe because SN node consider all forwarded payments through their node as zaps, so they will pass them through the lnproxy automatically?
Why do you think I use only CCs and do not open a channel with SN node from my node(s)?
Anyways, is a very good question your post.
Totally fair confusion.Lightning fees stack backwards, so it looks like one hop overcharged when it’s really downstream fees. Wallet UX makes this way more confusing than it should be.