ACINQ/eclair v0.2-beta1

Eclair v0.2-beta1

on GitHub

🎉 This is the first release of eclair that can be configured to run on mainnet (on previous versions, by design, users would have had to change a few lines of code and recompile to run on mainnet).

We've learned a lot from months of deployment on testnet and believe it is mature enough but, as with any beta software, you still need to be careful and not put too much money into it.

Verifying signatures

You will need gpg and our release signing key E434ED292E85643A. Note that you can get it:

• from our website: https://acinq.co/pgp/padioupm.asc
• from github user @pm47, a committer on eclair: https://api.github.com/users/pm47/gpg_keys

To import our signing key:

$ gpg --import padioupm.asc

To verify the release file checksums and signatures:

$ gpg -d SHA256SUMS.asc > SHA256SUMS.stripped
$ sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.stripped

BOLT Compatiblity

Eclair is fully compatible with all Lightning BOLTs and has been tested against other implementations.

Eclair uses Bitcoin Core to monitor the blockchain and will react to "cheating attempts" (the publishing by a peer of an old channel commit tx that is more favourable to them) and publish a penalty transaction which spends the cheating transaction. Previous versions of eclair only stole the offender's main output as punishment, this versions steal all outputs, including HTLCs.

Bitcoin Compatibility

Our server (eclair-node) and GUI applications (eclair-node-gui) do not embed their own wallet but instead call into you bitcoin core wallet using its RPC API. There a few things you need to enable on your bitcoin node (see our README) but eclair's interaction with the wallet are limited (creating funding transactions when you open channel and retrieving wallet addresses to send the funds to when you close channels) and should have a minimal impact on your setup. For example, eclair will work with encrypted bitcoin wallets (of course in that case you will have to temporarily unlock it when you create funding transactions).

Upgrading

⚠️ This release doesn't introduce breaking changes in the database format, but the data directory layout had to be modified to clearly separate data from testnet and mainnet.

If you are upgrading an existing installation of eclair (on testnet of course, since this is the first mainnet version), you don't have to close all your channels. You need to:

• stop eclair
• go into your datadir directory
• create a testnet directory and move all your *.sqlite files into this new directory
• restart eclair

The layout of you data directory will be:

├── eclair.log # application logs
├── testnet
│   ├── eclair.sqlite # channel database. do not delete if you have open channels !
│   └── network.sqlite # network database
└── seed.dat # node seed

ℹ️ if you want to run different instances of eclair on different chains (testnet, mainnet, regtest...) on the same machine at the same time, we strongly recommend that you use specific data directories for each chain (you can then start eclair with the -Declair.datadir=... option)

Eclair databases are versioned and in the future it will be possible to upgrade eclair without having to close all your channels first.

Routing payments

Eclair can send, relay and receive payments. When sending payments, it will try and calculate the cheapest (but not necessarily shortest) route using its local routing table.

Change log

• Add support for mainnet (#513)
• Extend penalty to stealing HTLC outputs (#517)
• Addition of API calls checkinvoice and findroute (#475) (thanks @n1bor)
• Eclair now requires Bitcoin Core v0.16.0 or higher
• In electrum mode, eclair now uses a pool of electrum clients connected to different servers
• Store db files in a chain-specific subdirectory of datadir
• Track version of each logical database (#495)
• Specify that we need at least jdk 1.8u161 to build (#491)
• Simplified blacklisting of nodes in case of payment failures (#489)
• Set a configurable maxPaymentFee as safety (#493)
• Proper clean up of private channels (#488)
• Update Funding tx id value in GUI when funding is signed (#511) (thanks @natewave)
• Complete commit logs