Changes in LND 0.16.1+

How new versions of LND may resolve or mitigate the unwanted force closes of channels.

Let’s remember what Alex Bosworth wrote in a tweet the april 24th

LND doubling the default CLTV delta value should mean fewer unwanted force closes of channels. When an HTLC is pending, if the channel peers lose connectivity for some reason and the timeout runs down, LND is forced to auto-close to resolve on-chain. CLTV delta dictates that time.

In LND changelog of version 0.16.1 we read infact

This is a minor release that contains a number of important bug fixes and optimizations. One item worth noting is that the default CLTV delay has been increased to 80 blocks up from 40 blocks. This increase the CLTV delta value from ~7 hours to ~13 hours. This change makes our default time locks more conservative which can help to avoid unnecessary force closures due to persistent mempool backlog, or node downtime.

Let’s check what it’s up on a real LND node infact, using the thunderhub tool:

We obviously can use the same tool to change the CTLV delta as the value we prefer, just clicking on the channel we want to modify, upon the web interface.

In LND changelog of version 0.16.2 we read

This is the second release in the v0.16.x cycle. This is primarily a hot fix release to fix some performance regressions introduced in the prior minor release. With his new release: the new mempool logic will no longer block start up (now async), runs with a longer periodic timer, and now leverages parallelization where applicable. A panic related to sweeper transaction replacement/conflicts has also been fixed.

So good reasons to make an upgrade of your node to the newest LND version

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