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

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ffaex/altpay.git

Change to the altpay directory:

cd altpay

Build the project:

cargo build --release

Copy the generated binary to a desired location:

cp target/release/altpay /usr/local/bin/

Configuration

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/"

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

echo 'export PK="your public key"' >> $HOME/.bashrc # WHAT?!
source $HOME/.bashrc

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