Best LN Liquidity Marketplaces
1130 sats \ 11 comments \ @kr 15 Jul 2022 bitcoin
What are your experiences with all the different Lightning liquidity marketplaces that are available today?
Which ones are the most reliable, least costly, or easiest to use?
Platforms like:
  • Lightning Pool
  • Amboss Magma
  • LN+
  • Liquidity Ads (CLN)
Or sites like:
I’m sure I’m missing lots of marketplaces or sites to get liquidity on Lightning, feel free to add any ones I missed in the comments.
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248 sats \ 2 replies \ @LNAnon69420 15 Jul 2022 freebie
ZFR is the best inbound to buy as a merchant/service, but ensure fees on other channels are high enough to prevent draining it. I do not recommend purchasing ZFR as a router, tho can make sense in a bootstrapping sense
Purchasing LNBIG inbound is highly unreliable, they have at least a couple hundred BTC inbound shortage
Magma selling faces the largest addressable market, being implementation-agnostic and requiring no client. However they take a decent cut now (1000ppm unless you sub). Magma seems to have facilitated more volume in the last month than Liq Ads or Pool and is much much easier to use and sell with than others
Pool can garner the highest premium in my experience, and interfaces with the largest implementation, tho requires client and some know how. Voltage plugs into this to make it somewhat easier. Additionally, to use Pool well you need to layer a lot of liquidity at different rates / lease lengths
Not much experience with CLN liq ads, though addressable market is currently relatively tiny
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120 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 15 Jul 2022
appreciate the thoughtful response. how can you tell that lnbig has an inbound shortage?
also, you’re right that magma has deployed more by. than pool this month, but ln+ has deployed more btc this month than both combined.
ln+ has a different system of getting liquidity though, i believe most of their vol is through triangle or square “swaps” rather than direct purchase. does this matter for a routing node?
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179 sats \ 0 replies \ @LNAnon69420 15 Jul 2022
I was running some rudimentary probing thru LNbig a couple weeks back, no hard numbers but inbound shortage is v apparent. You can see this in the difficulty it can take in trying to rebalance lnbig channels
Yes I'd classify LN+ seperately, no actual buying/selling occurs there atm. Swaps are essentially "I'll open a channel to Bob if Alice opens a channel to me" -- it is not a very selective process and the 'quality' of peers highly varies, you basically open a chan to random peer and receive a random chan in return. Some swap peers are great, some are bad. Contrast that to Magma where you may be selective in your peer or to Pool which uses an internal scoring system
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169 sats \ 1 reply \ @mikhael 15 Jul 2022
Pardon the question, but what is the point of getting liquidity? Outside of taking loans, is it for developers to experiment? Trying to understand why it's a thing - or maybe I'm just not understanding liquidity in this context.
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250 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 15 Jul 2022
Lightning nodes require both inbound and outbound liquidity to route payments, and require inbound liquidity to receive payments.
basically these marketplaces offer tools for node operators to get their desired amounts of inbound/outbound liquidity from the nodes they want to connect with.
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169 sats \ 1 reply \ @aljaz 15 Jul 2022
plebnet has a solid list of liquidity options https://plebnet.wiki/wiki/Getting_Inbound_Liquidity
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 15 Jul 2022
this is amazing, thanks!
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169 sats \ 3 replies \ @andyleroy 15 Jul 2022
fwiw I paid ~$31 fiat (via Lightning) for a 16.7M sat inbound channel from Y'alls (to get started better experimenting with routing and such) and it worked very well - it seems like it is set to the lowest fees on chain so it took a few hours to get confirmed.
https://yalls.org/about/
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169 sats \ 1 reply \ @andyleroy 15 Jul 2022
I'm planning on testing with a few of the others here over the next week, and will report back with any reviews.
It looks like Voltage may have an options as well? https://flow.voltage.cloud/
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 15 Jul 2022
Yes, I believe Voltage is using Pool to get liquidity.
I think it’s a much simpler interface to source liquidity, but I suspect fees would be derived from Pool fees.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 15 Jul 2022
nice!
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