That's very useful feedback. Thanks a lot.

The bitcoin on-chain fees increased rapidly within a short amount of time (spiking by more than 500x). Channels may automatically close as a protective measure. This isn't something specific to Alby, it's a built-in failsafe mechanism within the Lightning Network itself, designed to keep your funds secure during unexpected network events.

Is there a way to recover my funds without opening another channel? No funds are lost and you don't need to do anything. Since this was a forced channel closure, your bitcoin will reappear in the savings balance of your Hub within 14 days.

Where's my savings account? Your savings account is your bitcoin onchain wallet. You find it on the "Node" page of your Hub.

The underlying problem is that commitment transactions need to surpass the dynamic minimum mempool feerates of nodes in order to be admissible to mempools. When there is a huge spike in blockspace demand, mempools may overflow and begin evicting transactions. This may raise the bottom feerate of nodes’ mempools beyond prenegotiated feerates of commitment transactions. Those commitment transactions would then no longer be able to reliably close channels unilaterally. Some node implementations therefore preemptively close channels on feerate spikes.

With the release of Bitcoin Core 28.0 we will get opportunistic package relay for child-pays-for-parent transaction pairs. This will allow Lightning Commitment transactions to be submitted into mempools even if their individual feerate is lower than nodes’ dynamic mempool minimum feerates by sending them alongside a child transaction that raises the package’s feerate above the mempool minimum. Hopefully this work in Lightning implementations will progress quickly after the Bitcoin Core v28 release.

This happened due to this huge fee, short fee spike and an issue with some LSPs. It's actually a default lightning mechanism and a protective measure implemented in LDK. It's independent of Alby and happens across implementations. and it's a closure, the sats will become available in the savings balance.

we are investigating this and also collaborating with LSPs to see how this can be avoided in such a LSP relationship. It's independent of Alby and happens across implementations.

we will post an update later.

Wow this is a total tragedy... a few months ago something similar happened to me with a channel I had on Blixt, fortunately there were not many SATS around 30,000 SATS. I tried to restore my wallet but my SATS never appeared in LN, nor onchain, simply all channel records disappeared along with the SATS.

Also opening a channel during such a fee-spike is not recommended. we should add a warning to users about that.

The mempool fees have come down again already (5sat/vB on the second block and used it to be 1500sat/vB). I'd still wait a bit more.

FOLLOW UP

I just got my funds back on the Savings Balance :)

Thanks for the support @Alby

@Alby can you give more details? Indeed same happen to my Alby hub with a LDK backend. I think was due to these crazy high mempool fees going on. It really sucks when you buy an inbound channel and they FC on you... Also is really confusing, no info about the closing channel and where the sats are going, to which onchain wallet, closing tx, no way to trace that closing channel.

another case of "not your keys". chain fee spikes break channels between implementations as they cannot agree on commitment fees ((

On-chain fees are back to 3sat/vbyte now.

Hey Felipe. Do you remember what the network fees were when you opened this channel?

Electrum and Zeus might be more reliable than Alby. Its more than 60 USD I cannot even justify my suggestion.

So sad 😔

Just had the same happen to me