Protocols
Lightning
The Lightning Network is a network of payment channels for bitcoin. A payee can request money with a BOLT 11 invoice. Paying the invoice reveals a preimage that proves payment. L402 uses that invoice and preimage as the payment half of its HTTP 402 challenge. This index does not scan Lightning.
Explanation
BOLT 11 specifies how an invoice encodes the payment hash, the amount, and a description. The payer's wallet routes the payment across channels. The preimage is the cryptographic receipt. That receipt is what an L402 server checks. Lightning can also carry small payments, which is why it shows up in machine-payment discussions, but a Lightning payment is denominated in bitcoin, not in the USDC this index prices one-for-one.
Channel state is local to the nodes on a route. An outside indexer cannot reconstruct every settled invoice from one contract log. Until a public, attributable feed exists, Lightning volume is outside Agent GDP rather than estimated from a sample of nodes.
Live data
Related terms
Sources
- BOLT 11: Invoice Protocol for Lightning Payments — Lightning Network
- L402 protocol specification — Lightning Labs
- L402 — Lightning Labs