Altpay - Alternative payment Plugin for c-lightning

Altpay is a Lightning Network routing plugin for c-lightning that provides alternative routing using probabilistic scoring. It improves payment success rates and reduces payment fees by finding the most optimal routes in the network.

Features

• Optimized routing using probabilistic scoring
• Penalty setting for specific nodes
• Learns from successul payments and failed payments more about channel liquidities, those bounds get relaxed over time
• Pickhardt payments
• set preference for MPP in settings file

Requirements

• Rust (see https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install)
• sudo apt install build-essential
• sudo apt install libssl-dev
• sudo apt install pkg-config

Installation

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/ffaex/altpay.git

2. Change to the altpay directory: cd altpay

3. Build the project: cargo build --release

4. Copy the generated binary to a desired location: cp target/release/altpay /usr/local/bin/

Configuration

1. Create a configuration file named altpay.toml in $HOME/.config/. Set the appropriate values:

network = "testnet" # Use "bitcoin" for mainnet
ldk_data_dir = "/path/to/your/ldk_data_dir"
rpc_path = "/path/to/your/lightning-rpc"
mpp_pref = 0 (the lower the better)
rpc_path="/root/.lightning/testnet/lightning-rpc" # path to the clightning rpc socket for mainnet usually /root/.lightning/bitcoin/lightning-rpc
rapid_gossip_sync_url = "http://rapidsync.fyodor.de/mainnet/snapshot/"

2. set PK env variable to your public key of your lighting node

• echo 'export PK="your public key"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
• source $HOME/.bashrc

4. Start lightningd --testnet --plugin=/path to binary

Please note if opening new channels it can take up to 30min for the plugin to see them. Because it uses RapidSync https://lightningdevkit.org/blog/announcing-rapid-gossip-sync/. Uses this rapidsync server http://rapidsync.fyodor.de/. SNAPSHOT_CALCULATION_INTERVAL set to 30min

Usage

lightning-cli --testnet altpay bolt11_invoice
lightning-cli --testnet probe pubkey amount_msat
lightning-cli --testnet set_penalty pubkey penalty_value (the lower the better) lightning-cli --testnet network_probe

Special Thanks

@elsirion
@fiatjaf