Lightning Labs, the Lightning Network development team, has just released an update to its Litd node management tool aimed at making the network easier to use.
Lightning Network users need to run nodes themselves to send and receive non-custodial payments, making it difficult for newcomers to interact with the protocol.
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According to the devs, the Litd update greatly simplifies this process by abstracting some functions away from nodes so users don't have to manage them directly.
Michael Levin, a member of the team, has said:
"We have heard consistent feedback from the LN community and developers about the need to increase the automation of node administration and improve the tools to seamlessly onboard new users."
Typically, Lightning validators need to manually set the rate, so one of the main innovations has been to automate this process. The protocol now updates transaction fees on its own based on the number of weekly transactions for a particular node.
In addition, thanks to the update, several accounts can share the same node to reduce transaction costs.