Offline Receiving is Coming to Lightning

At the LNConf, a developer from Breez was just onstage and announced a new open-source project that will soon allow lightning wallet users to to receive payments via lightning without being online. The project is called Lightning Rod. It works using hodl-invoices and a special routing node called a Lightning Rod. Essentially, if you want to receive lightning payments when you're offline, your wallet provider (e.g. Breez, Acinq, Lightning Labs, etc.) needs to act as a routing node to you. If you're offline, they would use a hodl-invoice (which allows routing nodes to delay a payment up to the point of invoice expiration) and send your wallet an alert. The next time you get online, you'd receive that alert, open up your wallet, and -- if the invoice hasn't expired -- your wallet provider would notice you're online now and complete the route.

This idea allows wallet providers to let their users receive lightning payments even if they're offline, without any custodial risk. The only current downsides are that if you're offline for longer than the invoice is set to expire for, you don't get the money (the payment just fails), and if the sender chooses a route to your wallet which doesn't include a lightning rod node, it won't work. Anyway, it's a significant improvement even with those downsides, and Breez says it is on their roadmap for inclusion in their own wallet. It's also open source, so other wallet providers can do this too. Woot!

Submitted October 20, 2019 at 06:40PM by nowitsalllgone https://ift.tt/2P4ZkuC