Lightning
Payment routing
How a Lightning payment finds a path across the network to its recipient.
Lightning payments travel along a path of channels from sender to recipient. Each intermediate node forwards the payment and may charge a small routing fee.
What can go wrong
- No path exists with enough liquidity for the amount.
- A node along a candidate path is offline.
- The invoice expired before the payment completed.
Routing attempts are atomic: either the payment completes end to end, or nothing moves.