ElementsProject/lightning

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

3088 stars · 1013 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Core Lightning (CLN) is a specification-compliant Lightning Network node implementation written in C, maintained by Blockstream and in production on Bitcoin mainnet since 2018. It runs a lightning daemon (lightningd) with a JSON-RPC interface for managing channels and payments, and is highly customizable via plugins.

Use cases

• run a lightning network node on bitcoin mainnet
• send and receive lightning payments
• open and manage payment channels
• build lightning payment services on a customizable node
• experiment with lightning on testnet or regtest
• integrate lightning payments via JSON-RPC or plugins

When to choose

• you need a stable, spec-compliant lightning node for production mainnet use
• you want a lightweight, plugin-extensible node with a JSON-RPC API
• you run Linux or macOS and already operate a bitcoind backend

When to avoid

• you need Windows support, which is not available
• you want a GUI-first wallet rather than a daemon with RPC interface
• you cannot run a fully synced bitcoind instance

Facets

application · maturity stable

rpc networking cli cryptography p2p blockchain fintech self-hosted developer-tools cli self-hosted lightning-network bitcoin lightning-node payments blockstream json-rpc c cryptocurrency linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ElementsProject/lightning")