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Ticket to Ride: Locally Steered Source Routing for the Lightning Network

Authors Sajjad Alizadeh, Majid Khabbazian

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Networks
Keywords
  • Lightning Network
  • Source Routing
  • Approximate Membership Filters

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Abstract

Route discovery in the Lightning Network is challenging because senders observe only static channel capacities while real-time balances remain hidden. Existing locally steered schemes such as SpeedyMurmurs protect path privacy but depend on global landmark trees whose maintenance traffic and detours inflate latency and overhead.
We present Ticket to Ride (T2R), a locally steered source-routing framework that encodes the set of channels a payment may traverse into a compact ticket - an approximate-membership filter keyed with per-hop Diffie–Hellman secrets. Each relay learns only whether its own outgoing edges are permitted, yielding the same incident-edge privacy as SpeedyMurmurs while eliminating the need to build and maintain global landmark trees or any other shared routing state.
Extensive simulations on real snapshots - incorporating churn, silent shutdowns, and random channel saturation - show that T2R boosts end-to-end success by up to 9% and cuts median delay by 1.6× relative to SpeedyMurmurs, all with < 1 kB total overhead and no extra handshakes. Because tickets are processed hop-by-hop and can be prefixed by a trampoline, T2R remains lightweight enough for resource-constrained IoT nodes.

Cite As Get BibTex

Sajjad Alizadeh and Majid Khabbazian. Ticket to Ride: Locally Steered Source Routing for the Lightning Network. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 30:1-30:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.30

Author Details

Sajjad Alizadeh
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Majid Khabbazian
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Supplementary Materials

References

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