lightning-node-management

Create inbound liquidity

Pay with Lightning and receive onchain.

To create inbound liquidity (to be able to receive payments on a channel you opened) a payment can be sent to a merchant or exchange accepting Lightning and receive the product or receive the sats back on-chain.

To pay for various gift cards with lightning check out Bitrefill (referral link).

Non-custodial wallets

Run a separate LN node on your phone or desktop where you can move some funds, so remote balance/ inbound liquidity is created

Custodial wallets

Pay yourself via LN and benefit from the inbound liquidity created.

The drawback is that you don’t control the keys of your custodial wallet.

Examples:

Lightning Pool

Buy incoming channels on a permissionless marketplace: https://pool.lightning.engineering/ Usage notes: pool.md

Lightning Loop

Lightning Loop is a non-custodial service offered by Lightning Labs to bridge on-chain and off-chain Bitcoin using submarine swaps.

In the current iteration of the Loop software, two swap types are supported:

Microlancer.io

Pay for incoming channels.

ChainMarket

A Lightning to onchain swap market with batched transactions. Fee: 0.5%

Sats4Likes

Post an advert and pay satoshis for incoming channels.

Boltz

Fee: 0.5% both ways

Bitfinex

A non-KYC (if not used for fiat) exchange supporting Lightning deposits (free) and withdrawals (100 sats). Withdrawal onchain costs a fixed 40000 sats. Find it’s nodes at https://ln.bitfinex.com/

FixedFloat

Lightning cryptocurrency exchange Fee: 0.5 - 1% both ways

ZigZag.io

An exchange that accepts Lightning payments. Max 4M sats Commission ~ 2%

LightningTo.me

Opens a channel for free funded with 2 000 000 satoshis. Need to have 10 channels open already to use this service.
Add their node as a peer if connecting from behind Tor:
$ lncli connect 03bb88ccc444534da7b5b64b4f7b15e1eccb18e102db0e400d4b9cfe93763aa26d@138.68.14.104:9735

LightningPowerUsers.com

Request inbound capacity for a small fee Recommended channel size: Between 500 000 and 16 500 000 satoshis.

Thor: Lightning Channel-Opening Service by Bitrefill.com

Pay with Lightning for an inbound channel of up to 16 000 000 satoshis.

LNBIG.com

Buy incoming channels from https://twitter.com/lnbig_com

github.com/bitcoin-software/ln-liquidity

List of exchange services to make coin swaps LN <-> onchain & more