Welcome

Use a self-custodial Lighting Address without running your own public server

About

Ghost Addresses are self-custodial Lightning Addresses which allow node operators to receive payments directly to their node, without the hassle of setting up your own public server.

How does it work?

Ghost Addresses make use of a concept called Phantom Nodes and Phantom Payments (opens in a new tab) developed by the Lighting Dev Kit team. A Ghost Address combines Lightning Addresses and Phantom Payments to achieve a way to use Lightning Addresses in a self-custodial manner.

Whenever the payer asks for an invoice through the Ghost Address, an invoice will be created by the Phantom Node (ghst.to (opens in a new tab) in the diagram above). This invoice has the Phantom Node as destination and includes the payee's pubkey and a static channel id inside the route hints. When the payer tries to find a path to the Phantom Node, the node of the payee will recieve a forward request and recognize the Phantom Node's channel id. At this moment, the node will ask the Amboss API for the preimage and will settle the HTLC to claim the funds.

Setup

Currently, Thunderhub is the only client which implements the HTLC interceptor for Phantom Payments, but feel free to create your own! You can view the added logic to Thunderhub here (opens in a new tab) needed for Phantom Payments.

There are only 2 steps to setup your Ghost Address:

• Install Thunderhub (opens in a new tab) (>0.13.29) on the node where you want to receive the Phantom Payments.
• Claim your Ghost Address using the Thunderhub interface under the Amboss tab, or using our API.

Note: Since LND only supports 1 forward subscription at the time, you are unable to receive Phantom Payments whenever you have another forward subscription like Circuit Breaker enabled.

Costs

Ghost Addresses are free to use for all Amboss users!

Usernames

For all free Amboss accounts, a uniquely generated username is used for your Ghost Address, for example: [email protected].
Paying users are able to claim a vanity username, using lowercase letters and hyphens (-).

FAQ

How does the Ghost Address know my pubkey?

The Ghost Address gets the pubkey from your Amboss account with which you've claimed your address.

Does this work with multiple nodes linked to my Amboss account?

Yes! We will include all your pubkeys inside the route hints, but we do not know which node will settle the HTLC.

What are the privacy implications?

The only information that can be obtained from this process is the invoice amount and whether the associated preimage was requested. This process can't prove whether the payment was completed or not, but exposes the invoices created and that a payment was likely completed.