I'm trying to understand if Phoenix's liquidity management has changed with the introduction of splices.
Background:
- Used Phoenix for 5 years, initially funded with 300k sats from CEX
- Previously prepaid 1M sats liquidity for 2 years - worked well
- After draining, channel got spliced down to <500k, then 300k sats (insufficient for my needs)
Current Issue: Based on online research, I believed sending 1M+ sats would provide proper inbound/outbound liquidity. So I:
- Drained old wallet, created new seed
- Deposited 1M+ sats
- Got ~1M inbound / 990k outbound (paid 11k sats in fees - splicing, service, mining)
The Problem: When I sent 500k sats out to free up the wallet:
- Inbound dropped to <500k sats
- With 480k balance, could only receive 20k sats
- Sent 100k sats as test → paid another 1k sats splicing fee
Questions:
- Why did my channel get spliced again after sending funds out?
- Has the liquidity model changed? Do I now pay splicing fees every time?
- Can I maintain 500k-800k inbound liquidity "for free" like on my own Lightning node (Start9 + Alby)?
I know I can prepay inbound liquidity for 1 year, but I'm not interested in that option.
Thanks for any insights, sats incoming to the best.
I've used Phoenix since before the splicing update and I think I had something like this happen. My memory was that instead of sending sats out to a lightning address, I had somehow accidentally sent sats to an onchain address. And so Phoenix treated it as a splice out of the channel instead of a lightning transaction.
If you sent the 500k out to an onchain address, it will just change the size of your channel. and you would end up with a 500k sat smaller channel and very little inbound liquidity.
The solution is to make sure that when you send out sats to free up inbound liquidity, you do so to a lightning address. If you want the sats to end up in a cold storage or something, use a swap service like Boltz (they generate a lightning address, you send to it, they send the sats to an onchain address).
That's my best guess.
Phoenix will reduce the size of the channel ONLY if you send out to onchain the whole amount.
Always leave 1% of funds.
I'm sure you know better than me, but I've certainly had a channel size reduced when I sent 50% out to an onchain address from the Phoenix mobile app.
I suppose, this is the thing. Sending funds to onchain. Jesus, i didn't think of it like that. Thank you, explains a lot.
This happened to me a while back too. Was also disappointed that I lost the size of the channel.
These days if I want to pay an on chain address I use a swap service like Boltz and send via LN. If I want to increase the size of the channel just send onchain sats to the onchain address in Phoenix which will splice it into the channel.
Is simple: