Rebalance through nodes that want the flow.

A depleted channel earns nothing. Rebalancing fixes it — and today it is done blind, probing the public graph and mostly failing. Boltring is the coordinator that finds the cycles, so you rebalance through counterparties who want the flow instead of guessing.

What it is

In netting, a ring is a cycle of obligations that clears against itself. If five nodes each declare what they want to move, cycles among them become obvious: your outbound is someone's wanted inbound, theirs closes back to you. Everyone rebalances at once, and each pays far less than any would alone. This is multilateral compression, applied to Lightning liquidity.

What it is not

Boltring is never in the payment path. It never holds funds, never forwards, never has a preimage. It reads declared intents and channel state, computes cycles, and returns a route to each participant. You execute it yourself, with your own node's credentials. It is a discovery service, not a settlement service — Lightning has no multi-party atomic rebalance and Boltring does not invent one.

A node moving 500 000 sats pays 105 sats; one moving 50 000 000 pays 10 500. Blind rebalancing costs 200–1 000 ppm; coordinated should land under 100. The 210 ppm coordination fee is charged against prepaid credit and is a separate meter from the routing cost your ceiling governs — the two are never summed.

The trust model, named

The coordinator sees your channel balances and intents. That is unavoidable for the service to work, and it is stated rather than hidden. What you grant depends on how you connect:

The daemon keeps credentials on your own machine and cannot be drained by whoever operates the coordinator. Web-execute mode grants a spendable credential to your browser — you see exactly what that means before you choose it, on the next screen, not in a footnote.