Liquidity Ads

Liquidity ads are a way for Lightning nodes to advertise, directly over the network's gossip layer, that they are willing to contribute funds to a channel someone else opens to them — effectively selling inbound liquidity. They turn the gossip network itself into a decentralized marketplace for capacity, so a node that needs inbound liquidity can find sellers without relying on any centralized brokering service.

Built on dual-funded channels

Liquidity ads sit on top of dual-funded channels, in which both peers commit capital to a single channel at open time, immediately creating liquidity in both directions rather than only outbound for the initiator. The interactive transaction construction and dual-funding machinery are specified in the Lightning BOLTs and negotiated peer-to-peer as the funding transaction is built. A seller publishes the rate and terms at which it will match incoming channel-open requests with its own funds; a buyer reads those advertisements straight from gossip and opens a channel that the seller co-funds for an agreed fee. The upshot is a single confirmed payment channel that arrives pre-loaded with usable capacity on both sides.

How a seller prices its offer

The advertised terms are not arbitrary. A seller is locking up its own capital in your channel for as long as the channel lives, capital it could otherwise deploy elsewhere, so the fee reflects the opportunity cost and the risk that the channel closes early. Ads typically encode a lease of the committed funds for a minimum period, giving the buyer confidence the liquidity will not evaporate the moment the ink is dry, and giving the seller a predictable return for the commitment. Because every offer is visible in gossip, buyers can compare terms across the whole network and sellers must price competitively rather than as a monopolist, which is precisely the discipline an open marketplace imposes. A buyer, for its part, weighs the fee against what the same inbound capacity would cost through a centralized service, or against the slower route of earning it organically by routing payments over time, and in a healthy market the peer-to-peer option is often both cheaper and quicker to arrange.

A decentralized alternative to brokers

Centralized marketplaces — auction houses, listing sites, and the like — also match buyers and sellers of inbound liquidity, but they depend on a trusted facilitator to hold the order book and, in some designs, to escrow the deal. Liquidity ads remove that middleman entirely: every node can broadcast its own offer and read every other current offer natively, using the same gossip it already runs to route payments. There is no account to open, no operator to trust, and no single point that can censor or delist a participant. For sovereign operators this means sourcing inbound capacity peer-to-peer, in keeping with running infrastructure that answers to no central coordinator.

Managing capacity over time

Because a liquidity ad produces an ordinary channel, it slots directly into a node's normal capacity management. A seller who later wants to add or reclaim committed funds does not have to close and reopen: it can adjust the balance in place using our splice-in mechanism, keeping the channel — and its hard-won routing history — alive. For the operator trying to earn routing fees or simply keep a home node well-connected, liquidity ads plus splicing turn channel management into a continuous, self-directed activity rather than a series of expensive teardowns. It is a small but telling example of Lightning growing the primitives that let individuals participate in the network's economics on their own terms. Taken together, dual funding, liquidity ads, and splicing let a single operator run a genuinely dynamic node — sourcing capacity, pricing it, and reshaping it in place — without ever appealing to a gatekeeper for permission, which is exactly the posture a sovereign Bitcoiner wants from the infrastructure they depend on.