Connect Your Lightning Node To Peers

How to 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.” What they leave out is the fact that the Lightning network can run on top of and participate in multiple peer-to-peer blockchains. 

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):

After your node finishes launching and syncing access the connect page in your app.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 connect menu from your node overview at app.blockdaemon.com

Connet page links 

2. This places you in your node RETL 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.

Open and manage a Lightning node channel.