Updated: August 30, 2022

Introducing Flow: Effortlessly Create Lightning Channels

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Contents

Key Takeaways

Flow is making it possible for everyone to effortlessly create Lightning channels. Learn how leverage Flow to get channels for yourself or others.

Our team has been diligently working these last few months and we are excited to share a powerful new addition to the Voltage platform. Welcome, Flow. Flow leverages Pool from Lightning Labs, which allows you to easily get channels from other nodes on the Lightning Network. This makes it quicker than ever to create channels for yourself or for others. There is no setup or ongoing maintenance. Just pay a small fee and get inbound and/or outbound capacity. One of the largest pain points when using Lightning is efficient capital allocation. Flow is helping make this easier than before.

What is Flow?

Flow utilizes Pool, which is a non-custodial, peer-to-peer market that helps node operators exchange liquidity. In Pool, users can purchase channels from other nodes on the network. The leasing node retains full custody of its funds and inbound channels have a pre-agreed lease duration. Flow gives the Lightning liquidity market an easy interface for those in need of liquidity. With Flow, you can leverage our easy-to-use API or Dashboard (coming soon) to create orders in Pool auctions. No more setting up your own Pool account.

Why Flow is useful?

Flow helps solve a common problem node operators are experiencing. Operators are spending considerable energy on Telegram, Discord, and Twitter finding inbound liquidity from quality nodes. With Flow, you no longer have to go searching for channels. You can simply request a channel of a given size and you’ll get a channel from a node on the BOS List. This makes it very easy to get both inbound and outbound capacity for your node.

Additionally, you can use Flow to purchase channels for other nodes as well. By using Pool’s sidecar channels, you can purchase a channel for any node on the network. This allows you to help others with setting up a new node, onboarding your customers, or giving out channels as rewards. There are so many possibilities.

How to use it

Simply sign up for a Voltage account and install the Pool daemon on your node. Once complete, you can then use our API to create an order for a new channel. You will then be prompted to pay for the channel with an on-chain Bitcoin transaction or a Lightning payment. Once the payment is received the order generates a sidecar ticket. You can then use the sidecar ticket to open a channel on your node or anyone else’s node. Just register the ticket with the Pool daemon. Once the order gets matched, you have an open channel.

Closing

Our beta launch is complete and Flow is now available via our API and Dashboard. If you have any comments or suggestions please contact us.

To get started, please visit our documentation site. You can also visit our product page to learn more. We are very excited to hear your feedback so please don’t hesitate to contact us. We look forward to working with the community to make channel management increasingly easy. Start creating channels today!

If you have any questions or comments either email us at support@voltage.cloud, use our live on-site chat, or join us in Discord. ⚡️

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