Running phoenixd tests

A non-custodial Lightning node with built-in liquidity management

Today i tested phoenixd and got really impressed about how it is easy and fast to get a working non-custodial Lightning node running on your machine with this software.

What is phoenixd?

Phoenixd is a daemon which can run on your machine and brings you a non custodial node, with integrated liquidity management. Then you can use using powerful API provider or using the cli.

on the website: https://phoenix.acinq.co/server/ they provide the following descriptions, which i found correct, after testing it:

You can download the release from the link:

wget https://github.com/ACINQ/phoenixd/releases/download/v0.1.3/phoenix-0.1.3-linux-x64.zip
(obviously change with release version)

after unpacking you can find 2 executables. One is the phoenixd daemon and the other is the cli. When running the daemon for the first time you get the following view, an initialization stage which creates node seed.

Fees are obviously involved: pricing (~1% receive fee, on par with custodian alternatives)

Starting the daemon

The seed is then located in home directory of the user, as you can see:

~/.phoenix/seed.dat

then the daemon actually starts

Work with the cli

Now we can go on a different shell and open the cli. If run without parameters, you get the help, as you can see below:

Running some commands into the shell returns:

massmux@tiberius:~/GenericProjects/phoenix-0.1.3-linux-x64$ ./phoenix-cli getbalance
{
   "balanceSat": 0,
   "feeCreditSat": 375
}
massmux@tiberius:~/GenericProjects/phoenix-0.1.3-linux-x64$ ./phoenix-cli getinfo
{
   "nodeId": "038eb37977cXXX",
   "channels": [
   ],
   "chain": "mainnet",
   "version": "0.1.3-d805f81"
}

As you can see you can receive Lightning payments since the beginning but if the amount is too low to open a channel, the amount remains in a kind of cache (feeCreditSat). This is a custodial cache which will be sent to the standard balance when a new channel gets finally open. They accurately describe this situation in their documentation.

The available API

Moreover a powerful API is provided and well documented as you can see in the pages of the website

So finally i apreciated so much this software, easy to setup, nice to manage, with a powerful and welldone API. This could be a good solution for developing apps around with no pain in managing the node itself.