A Lightning node that does not advertise its IP and port?

Let's see why and how the Binance node was created without advertising its IP and port.

Some weeks ago the Binance Lightning node appeared online. A lot of people immediately came to check this node on various explorers to see the channel topology and structure. We have seen this has very big channels with Kraken, Bitfinex, etc. and this is not surprising.

But when we check out the general infos, something strange appears :

Don’t you see anything strange in the above image?

Yes, we see the public key, but not the full IP and port to connect to the node. I found this interesting and explained as a way not to allow anyone to connect and open a channel. So i made a search in order to see how to configure the node in order to get the same result.

LND configuration

So here is how to configure LND to get the same result and avoid other nodes to connect to yours.

In lnd.conf configuration file, these are the settings to specify

externalip=

nolisten=true

In this way the IP and port will not be advertised and therefore your node will not accept incoming channels.

The second setting, is optional, and will disable listening for incoming p2p connections. So this is very restrictive.

I always suggest to advertise the node in order to get incoming channel connections because this is the most useful use you can do with your node, but there can be situations in which this is not what you prefer.

In this article we saw how to achieve that result in case it is needed.