LND Circular Rebalancing - Fix Routes, Fees, and Liquidity

What Is LND Circular Rebalancing?

Circular rebalancing sends a payment from your node, through the network, back to yourself — moving liquidity from an outbound-heavy channel to an inbound-heavy one without closing channels.

Common Errors

• no route found for rebalance
• fee too high: rebalance not economical
• payment timeout: circular route took too long
• insufficient local balance to initiate rebalance

Manual Circular Rebalance

# Step 1: Create invoice on your own node
lncli addinvoice --amt 100000

# Step 2: Find a circular route
lncli queryroutes --dest <your_pubkey> --amt 100000 \
  --outgoing_chan_id <outbound_channel>

# Step 3: Send along the route
lncli sendtoroute --payment_hash <hash> \
  --routes <route_json>

Using bos (Balance of Satoshis)

# Install bos
npm install -g balanceofsatoshis

# Rebalance: push 100k sats from chan A to chan B
bos rebalance \
  --out <outbound_chan_id_or_peer_pubkey> \
  --in <inbound_chan_id_or_peer_pubkey> \
  --amount 100000 \
  --max-fee 1000

Using charge-lnd for Auto-Rebalancing

# charge-lnd adjusts fees to incentivize natural rebalancing
# Install
pip install charge-lnd

# Config example
[mynode]
strategy = proportional
min_fee_ppm = 10
max_fee_ppm = 500

Tips

• Keep rebalance fees below your routing revenue margin
• Target channels with > 90% local or > 90% remote balance
• Use --max-fee to avoid overpaying on bos rebalance
• Schedule during low-fee periods (weekends, off-peak hours)

Need help setting up auto-rebalancing? DM on Nostr.