Lightning to IC Bridge

General Intros
1

I’ve been cooking up something :fire: and it’s finally ready to share:

The goal of the project - make it dead easy to get your Bitcoin onto the IC ecosystem via the Lightning Network. Just fast, low-fee deposits straight into the ckBTC ecosystem — with a smooth, gorgeous UI.

:firecracker: Why This Exists

As powerful as the IC and ckBTC are, the current flow for getting BTC onto the network is kinda irritating (until ckBoost gets to mainnet and gets adopted - I’m building that one as well).

With Infernan Lightning Bridge, you just:

  1. Generate a Lightning invoice
  2. Pay it
  3. Boom — ckBTC lands in your Internet Computer wallet

All in a few seconds. Zero headaches.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Try it live here: https://lightning.infernal.finance/

:compass: What’s Next?

  • ckBTC → Lightning: The “exit ramp” is coming — send your BTC back out.
  • Deposit Tracker: Easily view your deposit history and status.
  • Public Dashboard: See real-time stats on volume, activity, and more.
  • and some more

:speech_balloon: Try It, Break It, Tell Me

Would love your feedback — features you want, bugs you hit, or just general thoughts. Hit me up!

Thanks for your time — let me know what you think :raising_hands:

8 Likes
2

This is actually very cool. I could see this become the main way yo transfer BTC given multiple exchanges support LN now. LN on the IC is something i would love to see.

1 Like
3

I just did it and it worked. How is this done?

1 Like
4

It’s connected with self-hosted Lightning Node, which has enough liquidity and channels open to have low routing fees and on IC side - it uses hot wallet with some ckBTC locked in. In the background I’m doing periodic rebalancing - basically, bridging mainnet BTC from Lightning Node’s wallet ckBTC to fill hot wallet once its liquidity gets too low.

if it takes off - I’ll introduce liquidity provider functionality which will allow everyone to provide liquidity on IC

4 Likes
5

Cool project, the management of the LN node is automated?

How much in BTC can be transferred reliably via Lightning to an IC address?

2 Likes
6

Yes, it is

regarding liquidity - it will process around ~$200 transactions without any hiccups for now. I’ll gradually increase that to ~2k deposits

3 Likes
7

Is there a way to build all of this in a decentralized manner?

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If you mean running some kind of Lightning Node inside the canister - I don’t think so

Creating an infrastructure where different providers could plug their self-hosted nodes - probably yes. I’ll think about that in the scope of ckBoost.

3 Likes
9

It would be sick if you could run a LN node inside a canister and set up all this stuff in a decentralized way, but I’m sure there are other approaches to make this work.

1 Like
10

There can be some workarounds, but for straightforward implementation we would need IC canisters to:

  • support TCP sockets
  • have long-lived connections

but, again, there can be a way to build an infra where anyone would be able to plug in their Lightning Node and become service provider

4 Likes