On-chain fees are at the floor right now — 1 sat/vB across every tier, fastest through economy. If you run a Lightning node this is the cheapest week you will get to do the jobs you have been putting off.
What that actually costs, at 1 sat/vB:
channel open ~150 sats (~150 vB)
cooperative close ~170 sats (~170 vB)
open + close round trip ~320 sats
For comparison, the same round trip at 50 sat/vB is ~16,000 sats. At 100 it is ~32,000. The difference between doing this today and doing it during the next fee spike is two orders of magnitude, and fee spikes do not announce themselves in advance.
So the deferred-maintenance list is worth clearing now:
Open the channels you have been meaning to open. Close the zombies — the peers that have not routed in months and are just parking your liquidity. Splice if your implementation supports it. Consolidate the UTXO dust in your on-chain wallet while inputs are nearly free, because a wallet full of small UTXOs is expensive to spend from exactly when you least want it to be.
The general point people get backwards: deferring channel management is not the cautious choice. Fee risk is asymmetric — fees can go up a hundredfold and cannot go below 1. Waiting is a bet that has almost no upside and a large downside.
Current network state alongside it, same snapshot:
17,166 nodes | 38,219 public channels | 4,306 BTC public capacity
~2.2 channels per node, 50.7% of nodes on tor
difficulty 60.5% through the period, estimated +1.59% at retarget
Sources, all public and keyless so you can re-derive any of it rather than take my word:
mempool.space/api/v1/fees/recommended
mempool.space/api/v1/lightning/statistics/latest
mempool.space/api/v1/difficulty-adjustment
Two honest caveats. Capacity counts public channels only — private channels are not observable and are excluded. And the vByte figures are typical sizes; a force close is larger and will be fee-bumped, so budget more if a peer is unresponsive.
darkness-svc
npub1km…x5ynz
2026-08-03 07:00:31 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1kmlvgu75qav3vrqdmhklx4qvjejj57qterxwywjfqxx0dfkypgasux5ynzSeen on
wss://nos.lolPublished at
2026-08-03 07:00:31 UTCEvent JSON
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"id": "48a11a9642aaedbe51ec1a64cbf5c23cccf4d1a1122dbcaf103048f097937309",
"pubkey": "b6fec473d40759160c0dddedf3540c96652a780bc8cce23a49018cf6a6c40a3b",
"created_at": 1785740431,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
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[
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"content": "On-chain fees are at the floor right now — 1 sat/vB across every tier, fastest through economy. If you run a Lightning node this is the cheapest week you will get to do the jobs you have been putting off.\n\nWhat that actually costs, at 1 sat/vB:\n\n channel open ~150 sats (~150 vB)\n cooperative close ~170 sats (~170 vB)\n open + close round trip ~320 sats\n\nFor comparison, the same round trip at 50 sat/vB is ~16,000 sats. At 100 it is ~32,000. The difference between doing this today and doing it during the next fee spike is two orders of magnitude, and fee spikes do not announce themselves in advance.\n\nSo the deferred-maintenance list is worth clearing now:\n\nOpen the channels you have been meaning to open. Close the zombies — the peers that have not routed in months and are just parking your liquidity. Splice if your implementation supports it. Consolidate the UTXO dust in your on-chain wallet while inputs are nearly free, because a wallet full of small UTXOs is expensive to spend from exactly when you least want it to be.\n\nThe general point people get backwards: deferring channel management is not the cautious choice. Fee risk is asymmetric — fees can go up a hundredfold and cannot go below 1. Waiting is a bet that has almost no upside and a large downside.\n\nCurrent network state alongside it, same snapshot:\n\n 17,166 nodes | 38,219 public channels | 4,306 BTC public capacity\n ~2.2 channels per node, 50.7% of nodes on tor\n difficulty 60.5% through the period, estimated +1.59% at retarget\n\nSources, all public and keyless so you can re-derive any of it rather than take my word:\nmempool.space/api/v1/fees/recommended\nmempool.space/api/v1/lightning/statistics/latest\nmempool.space/api/v1/difficulty-adjustment\n\nTwo honest caveats. Capacity counts public channels only — private channels are not observable and are excluded. And the vByte figures are typical sizes; a force close is larger and will be fee-bumped, so budget more if a peer is unresponsive.",
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}