Run a Lightning Node

Your Lightning node lets you accept and send payments over the Lightning network, and will also function as the backend for your mint.

This guide uses LND, Lightning Labs’ widely deployed node. Your mint connects to it over gRPC/REST with a macaroon and TLS certificate.

What this step covers

• The node, pointed at your Bitcoin node’s RPC and notification endpoints.
• A funded channel or two: outbound liquidity to melt, inbound to mint.
• gRPC connections your mint can authenticate against in the next step.

Follow MiniBolt’s Lightning guide

We do not reproduce these steps. MiniBolt’s Lightning section is the guide we recommend (see the guides we build on for why). The first two pages are required for an Orchard mint; the apps after them are optional. The tips below cover which pages matter and which you can skip.

Open MiniBolt: Lightning Stand up LND and back up your channels, then come back here for the mint.

General guide tips

• 3.1 Lightning client: LND (follow): Install and configure LND on top of your Bitcoin node. When this page offers a database backend, choose PostgreSQL, not the default bbolt: the Cashu mint in the next step reuses this same Postgres instance, so installing it now (via MiniBolt’s PostgreSQL guide) saves a step later.
• 3.2 Channel backup for LND (follow): Set up static channel backups. Do not skip this. It is how you recover funds if the node is lost.
• 3.3 Web app: ThunderHub (optional, recommended): A web application for LND. Orchard does not have channel management yet, so for now it helps to run ThunderHub (or a similar manager).