The Lightning Network Daemon (lnd) - is a complete implementation of a
Lightning Network node. lnd has several pluggable back-end
chain services including btcd (a
full-node), bitcoind, and
neutrino (a new experimental light client). The project's codebase uses the
btcsuite set of Bitcoin libraries, and also
exports a large set of isolated re-usable Lightning Network related libraries
within it. In the current state lnd is capable of:
Creating channels.
Closing channels.
Completely managing all channel states (including the exceptional ones!).
Maintaining a fully authenticated+validated channel graph.
Performing path finding within the network, passively forwarding incoming payments.
lndfully conforms to the Lightning Network specification
(BOLTs). BOLT stands for:
Basis of Lightning Technology. The specifications are currently being drafted
by several groups of implementers based around the world including the
developers of lnd. The set of specification documents as well as our
implementation of the specification are still a work-in-progress. With that
said, the current status of lnd's BOLT compliance is:
BOLT 1: Base Protocol
BOLT 2: Peer Protocol for Channel Management
BOLT 3: Bitcoin Transaction and Script Formats
BOLT 4: Onion Routing Protocol
BOLT 5: Recommendations for On-chain Transaction Handling
BOLT 7: P2P Node and Channel Discovery
BOLT 8: Encrypted and Authenticated Transport
BOLT 9: Assigned Feature Flags
BOLT 10: DNS Bootstrap and Assisted Node Location
BOLT 11: Invoice Protocol for Lightning Payments
Developer Resources
The daemon has been designed to be as developer friendly as possible in order
to facilitate application development on top of lnd. Two primary RPC
interfaces are exported: an HTTP REST API, and a gRPC
service. The exported APIs are not yet stable, so be warned: they may change
drastically in the near future.
An automatically generated set of documentation for the RPC APIs can be found
at api.lightning.community. A set of developer
resources including guides, articles, example applications and community resources can be found at:
docs.lightning.engineering.
Finally, we also have an active
Slack where protocol developers, application developers, testers and users gather to
discuss various aspects of lnd and also Lightning in general.
When operating a mainnet lnd node, please refer to our operational safety
guidelines. It is important to note that lnd is still
beta software and that ignoring these operational guidelines can lead to
loss of funds.
Security
The developers of lnd take security very seriously. The disclosure of
security vulnerabilities helps us secure the health of lnd, privacy of our
users, and also the health of the Lightning Network as a whole. If you find
any issues regarding security or privacy, please disclose the information
responsibly by sending an email to security at lightning dot engineering,
preferably encrypted using our designated PGP key
(91FE464CD75101DA6B6BAB60555C6465E5BCB3AF) which can be found
here.
