LND v0.18.0-beta: Smarter UTXO Sweeping, Inbound Fees, Route Blinding & More
The Lightning Network Daemon (LND) is a complete implementation of a Lightning Network node developed by Lightning Labs.
- "This is a major release which includes tons of bug fixes, performance improvements, and ofc new protocol features," announced the project.
- It includes support for blinded paths (forwarding), a new native SQL invoice database, deadline aware HTLC/commitment transaction RBF/CPFP fee bumping, experimental support for inbound channel fees (discount only), first class probing for payment fee estimation,
testmempoolacceptawareness for all transaction publishing, and much more!
"We are grateful for the ongoing support from external contributors on all fronts from development to review to testing. A total of 55 developers contributed to this release," was stated in a blog post.
Highlights
- Improved UTXO Sweeping process, to ensure timely confirmations in highly variable on-chain fee environments. This is achieved by incorporating a deadline-aware sweeping methodology which provides users with increased control over the urgency of transactions and the fees they are willing to pay.
- SQL Schema store for invoices, which allows users setting up new nodes to choose a relational database like SQLite or Postgres for storing invoice data. This enables better scaling and performant node operations with the growth of invoice data on the node.
- Inbound fees, a much requested feature for advanced routing node operations, will provide an ability to apply discounts to route through specific channels of a node.
- Route Blinding, a new protocol for improving payment receiver privacy, is now a supported feature on LND, providing the ability to send and forward payments to blinded routes.
- Fee estimation for payments, now available as a feature via the
EstimateRouteFeeRPC, will provide reliable fee estimates for invoices.
For the complete list of changes included in v0.18, take a look at the full release notes,
