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Dynamicfees eclair plugin

This is a plugin for eclair to adjust your channel relay fees dynamically according to the channel balance. The plugin conceptually defines 3 states in which the channel [balance] can be and a multiplier associated to each state, the multiplier will be used to compute the new relay fees.

• Depleted: when 'toLocal' becomes too little the channel is considered depleted
• Saturated: when 'toLocal' becomes too large the channel is considered saturated
• Balanced: when the channel is not depleted nor saturated then it's balanced, no multiplier applied

The goal of the plugin is to keep the user's channel balanced by incentivizing the usage of depleted channels and disincentivizing the usage of saturated channels, with this strategy the channels naturally tend to stay in a balanced state. Note that if all nodes on the network apply this strategy all the users would benefit from a more balanced network. The plugin works by intercepting the relayed payments and creates a new channel_update if and only if the channel is transitioning from a state to another (i.e going balanced -> depleted), the plugin will ignore sent/received payments because they are user initiated. The plugin will apply the multiplier only to the fee_proportional value of the relay fee and use the configured value in eclair.fee-proportional-millionths as basepoint for the multiplication. This means that a manually updated relay fee will be overridden by the plugin once there is a relayed payments that make the channel transition to a new state.

Installation

The plugin can be built locally, it's a fat jar that must be passed as argument to eclair when it's launched, see the instructions.

First you need to build Eclair

git clone https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair.git

cd eclair/

git checkout v0.9.0

mvn install -DskipTests=true

Then build the plugin

git clone https://github.com/rorp/eclair-plugin-dynamicfees.git

cd eclair-plugin-dynamicfees/

mvn package

The last mvn command will put the plugin's JAR file into target directory.

Usage

Once the plugin is configured and loaded it doesn't need any further input from the user, below there is a breakdown of how the plugin works:

1. for each relayed payment retrieve the data for the channels involved (in/out)
2. for each channel involved, if the channel is not blacklisted OR if the whitelist is non-empty and the channel is whitelisted
3. compute the channel balance status
4. • if the balance is below the depleted threshold compute the new fee according to depleted multiplier
   • if the balance is above the saturated threshold compute the new fee according to saturated multiplier
   • if the balance is above depleted and below saturated threshold use multiplier 1x
5. create a candidate channel_update using the new fee
6. • if the previous channel_update contains the same fees as the candidate do not broadcast it
   • if the previous channel_update contains different fees from the candidate do broadcast it

Configuration

Users MUST define a configuration section specifying the chosen values for their depleted/saturated thresholds and their relative multiplier, note that the plugin only asks for a depleted and saturated thresholds and everything in between will be considered balanced. It is possible to specify either a blacklist OR a whitelist of channel short_ids, this allows to filter only for certain channels or filter out channels that you want to exclude from the dynamic fees operations:

In eclair.conf add: