Lightning Network Node Recovery

All the resources you need to help you recover your LN node.

Welcome, Lightning Network node operator!
This page aims to help anyone who has suffered some sort of crash or data loss on their Lightning Network node.

Currently the content is mostly focused on lnd (disclaimer: the initial author of this page is guggero who works for Lightning Labs). Contributions to this page are welcome, especially if they target other implementations! Please submit a Pull Request here.

Links

• Official lnd recovery guide: Use if you have your lnd wallet seed and a Static Channel Backup file (channel.backup).
  The old version of the same recovery guide can be found here.
• guggero chantools: Use if the above guide did not recover all funds and you have a version of the channel.db file.
• How to recover channels without an SCB file: Use if you only have your lnd wallet seed but no channel backup file.
• Operational Safety Guide: Read this to avoid any future data loss! This is a must-read article for anyone that's operating an lnd node (most of it also applies to other implementations).
• How to avoid recovery in the future: Best practices for avoiding failures with Lightning Nodes.

Zombie Channel Recovery Matcher (alpha)

What's this?

This is a simple tool to help node operators who ran into the Zombie Channel problem during fund recovery: One or more of their channel peers were offline at the time of the recovery so the channels couldn't be closed.
With this form such a node operator can register their node and submit any form of contact information. It is very likely that the remote peer also has the same problem (they weren't able to recover funds) so if they also register here, I can match them up.

What happens if there's match?

With the help of chantools it is possible to close a channel even if both nodes only have the seed available. They need to cooperate and communicate though. I will contact both peers if there is a match and help them negotiate a channel close.

How do you know the channel balance?

This will be the most tricky part. That information is not recoverable anymore. Therefore I will ask both of the involved peers for an estimate on their balance on the target channel. If both estimates agree, cool! If there is no agreement, I will go ahead and offer both sides exactly 50% of the funds (after fees). That might not be fair in all cases but is better than losing the funds forever.

Do I need to give you my seed?

No! If both peers cooperate, everything can be done through PSBTs which means both parties need to sign the transaction (using chantools) but don't need to give the seed to anyone.

Why should I trust you?

You shouldn't! Even though I work on the Lightning Network full time (and in my spare time as well) and have absolutely no interest in cheating anyone out of their funds, you still should be careful to enter your node information anywhere. This should be your absolute last resort and you should try all the guides linked above first!

Submit your information to get notified on a match

Node ID (identity_pubkey)

How to contact on match (email, Twitter, Telegram, ...)

CAPTCHA code

Notify me on match