ElementsProject/lightning v26.04rc1

v26.04 Release Candidate 1

on GitHub

Release Candidate 1 for Core Lightning v26.04

Highlights for Users

• You can now add a note when paying (payer-note in xpay).
• listpeerchannels can filter by channel_id, so you can zoom in on one channel without parsing the full list.
• Improved payment reliability through parallel pathfinding and multiple bug fixes in askrene.
• offer now includes a fronting_nodes option, while the new payment-fronting-node config allows you to specify preferred peers that help route payers to your invoices and offers across both BOLT11 and BOLT12 flows.
• Offer-related RPCs now expose decoded descriptions directly, making it easier to inspect, debug, and understand incoming and outgoing offers without manual decoding.
• gossipd offloads gossip_store compaction to a helper, improvin startup time especially for larger nodes while keeping the store around ~200MB.
• New currencyrate plugin exposes a currencyconvert RPC, enabling real-time conversion between Bitcoin and fiat currencies directly within Core Lightning.
• Most binaries are ~20% smaller .

Highlights for Developers

• clnrest-register-path allows plugins to register custom HTTP endpoints at runtime, enabling dynamic REST APIs without restarting the node.
• bcli plugin is now synchronous: Simplifies the codebase and improves reliability of Bitcoin backend interactions by removing async complexity and queueing.
• Core Lightning builds are reproducible/deterministic on Fedora targets.
• Plugin options can now accumulate multiple values ("multi": true).
• STRICT tables and additional safety pragmas improve correctness and catch issues earlier during development.
• Lightningd now uses a more efficient ring buffer for logs, reducing overhead and simplifying log handling.
• Peer messages are now padded to a uniform length, mitigating traffic analysis and making it harder to infer node activity from message sizes.

Protocol Updates

• Legacy onion format support is removed (aligned with current interop, e.g. recent LND behavior).
• A splicing fix avoids an occasional hang when there is a pending closing HTLC during splice.

See the changelog for full details

Since v25.12 we’ve had 421 commits in 110 days by 23 authors

A special thanks to our three first time contributors:

@ScuttoZ
@Raimo33
@TatianaMoroz
@dovgopoly
@erdoganishe
@Nazarevsky

An enormous thanks to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @sangbida, @endothermicdev, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, and @niftynei