Author: Bastien TEINTURIER 2020-10-05 13:12:51
Published on: 2020-10-05T13:12:51+00:00
The proposal of allowing fundees to pay a portion of the commit-tx on-chain fees is being discussed in the Lightning Network community. The current rule, where the funder pays all the fees for simplicity's sake, becomes questionable as time goes by and both peers earn value from the channel. The risk associated with having pending HTLCs has been identified, and it is suggested that fundees should pay a portion of the fees to avoid creating a web-of-trust network. Routing nodes may also be at risk when they receive HTLCs, so it is proposed that nodes pay for the on-chain fees of the HTLCs they offer while they're pending in the commit-tx, regardless of whether they're funder or fundee. The simplest way to implement this would be to deduce the HTLC cost from the offerer's main output while keeping the base commit tx weight paid by the funder. A more extreme proposal suggests tying the total commit-tx fee to the channel usage, where each node pays a proportion of the fee proportional to the number of HTLCs they offered. This model uses the on-chain fee as collateral for usage of the channel and creates a healthy incentive for fundees to care about on-chain feerates. It may also create a feedback loop between on-chain feerates and routing fees, which is seen as a good long-term thing. However, there may be negative side-effects to consider, and the additional complexity of the proposal may not be worth it. The fees for HTLC transactions are always paid by the party that broadcasts them, but it is suggested that this may not be enough and can even be abused by fundees in some setups. The Lightning Network community welcomes feedback and challenges to the proposal.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T02:19:23.877759+00:00