LND Circular Rebalancing - Fix Route and Fee Errors

What Is LND Circular Rebalancing?

Circular rebalancing moves liquidity from an outbound-heavy channel to an inbound-heavy one by routing a payment through yourself. Keeps channels balanced for routing revenue.

Common Errors

• no route found: insufficient liquidity on circular path
• TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE on self-payment loop
• rebalance failed: fee exceeds budget
• cannot pay self: invoice requires different pubkey

Manual Circular Rebalance via lncli

# Step 1: Create invoice to yourself
lncli addinvoice --amt 100000

# Step 2: Pay via specific outbound channel
# Use --outgoing_chan_id to force the outbound channel
lncli payinvoice --outgoing_chan_id <chan_id> <payment_request>

# Find channel IDs
lncli listchannels | grep chan_id

Using balance-of-satoshis (bos)

# Install bos
npm install -g balanceofsatoshis

# Rebalance: move 200k sats from chan A to chan B
bos rebalance \
  --out <outbound_peer_pubkey> \
  --in <inbound_peer_pubkey> \
  --amount 200000 \
  --max-fee-rate 500

Fix: Route Not Found

# Try lower amount
bos rebalance --out <pub> --in <pub> --amount 50000

# Increase fee budget
bos rebalance --out <pub> --in <pub> --amount 100000 --max-fee 2000

# Check if path exists via probing
bos probe --out <pub> <dest_pub> --tokens 100000

Struggling with channel rebalancing? DM on Nostr for a free diagnostic.