Today, Voltage is announcing the gradual shutdown of the Flow 1.0 liquidity provision service. From Voltage’s beginning, we knew that we wanted to make acquiring inbound liquidity as easy for users. To this end, we designed and deployed Flow. Flow would utilize the liquidity leasing service known as Lightning Pool and serve as a method to interact with Lightning Pool in a low-friction way for not just people using Voltage for their nodes but everyone running LND.
Improvements
In recent months, we have launched LNC (Lightning Node Connect) for everyone running Standard or Professional nodes on Voltage. With LNC, users can easily access the full functionality of Lightning Pool through Lightning Terminal. If you are currently a user of Flow, we encourage you to set up your Lightning Terminal connection through https://terminal.lightning.engineering.
Flow 2.0 On Demand Liquidity
Also in recent months, we have launched Flow 2.0, an entirely different system. Still, we believe will be better at provisioning on-demand liquidity for Voltage users and users of the entire Lightning Network. Flow 2.0 is already producing and powering lighting applications such as Mutiny Wallet. We are also working hard to have Flow 2.0 built into the user interface.
On September 28, 2023 we will disable purchasing new Flow 1.0 sidecar tickets. All existing tickets and balances will be preserved, so if you have an active order, it will remain active. Only new orders will be disabled. We will refund those with dynamic balances on their Flow accounts in the coming weeks.
For future liquidity needs outside of Flow 2.0, in addition to utilizing Lightning Pool directly, we encourage users to consider using https://amboss.space/magma and https://amboss.space/hydro for automatic liquidity from the wider lightning community.
