Connect Your Lightning Node To Peers

Connect your node to Peers

When talking about the Lightning Network, most people implicitly mean “The Lightning Network running on top of the bitcoin blockchain.”  

The management of this is made simple via the Node RTL* dashboard.  If you're accessing your dashboard for the first time (during initial set up):

*Ride The Lightning

After your node finishes launching and syncing access the connect page when logged into your Blockdaemon dashboard.

Note: This can take a few moments, so please wait till it cycles through, initializing, launching, syncing, and is showing Running, Synced as its status.  Periodically hit refresh to update the page

1. Navigate to your RTL dashboard by following the link in the Actions → Connect menu from your node overview at the Blockdaemon dashboard

Connet page links 

2. This places you in your node RTL dashboard:

Click on Peers and enter a peer PubKey and click, <Connect>

Note: If the peer you are trying to connect is a Blockdaemon node, you can go to the secrets endpoint link in the connect links. The info you need is in the Node Channel URI section.  All endpoint links must contain <pubkey@ip:port>

Example:  02d23fa6794d8fd056c757f3c8f7979792138dafffedc831fc570cab572620dc61@54.224.118.176:9735

Once a peer has been added you will see it show up in your Peer list below

Your next step once you've connected to the peer is to create a channel with funds.

Further Reading:

Open and manage a Lightning node channel.