How to manually rebalance Lightning Network channels?

Question

I'm running an LND node that has a few dozen channels open to various relevant vendors/routing nodes. There are a couple specific channels that are open with stores that are getting used with most of the balance being on the remote side. I'm unsure how to manually rebalance these specific channels without closing them.

Is it possible to manually rebalance the channels from within my own LND node using the command line or some other way?

Answer 1

Lnd itself does as far as I remember not provide an api for rebalancing channels.

However there is the lndmanage repository that uses the lnd api to provide a pretty strong rebalancing tool

https://github.com/bitromortac/lndmanage

Such rebalancing will cost you routing fees as they are regular (circular) payments.

That being said it is not clear why you would want to rebalance your channels before an onion on them actually fails. There is currently the discussion about JIT routing (which rebalance just in time if a channel such should be used can't be used) and fee free rebalancing taking place on the lightning-dev Mailinglist.

Answer 2

In addition to lndmanage you can also use this script (I'm the author):

https://github.com/C-Otto/rebalance-lnd

Using the -f parameter you can select a channel with more than 50% of the funds on the remote side. The script then sends funds to one of your channels (with at most 50% of the funds on the local side, after receiving the transaction), resulting in a 50-50 balance on the channel you specified.

There are some tweaks (channel selection, amount absolute/percentage, ...) that you may want to look into.

Answer 3

1. Create an invoice for yourself: lncli addinvoice <amt>
2. Pay the invoice specifying the outgoing channel and the last hop to take before paying you: lncli payinvoice --allow_self_payment --outgoing_chan_id <outgoing_chan> --last_hop <last_hop> <payreq_from_1>

To get the outgoing channel id use lncli listchannels --active_only. I usually have to grep for the remote_pubkey that I get from Zeus interface and then look for the chan_id string.

The last hop is the remote_pubkey of the node associated with the channel you want to increase the local balance on.

I learned this from this pull request documentation: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/3736

Good luck rebalancing!