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Mission-Control Style Router

Score graph edges with fees, CLTV, and historical failures. Benchmark success rate against a naive Dijkstra baseline.

Advanced2 weeks
./submit./open-lessonls ./roadmap

Overview

Pathfinding is a product differentiator. Build a service that proposes routes using your own scoring function.

Without a benchmark harness, "smarter routing" is just storytelling. Log attempt outcomes and measure success rate, fees, and retries.

Heuristics to try

  • Fee cost + risk penalty
  • Channel age / capacity priors
  • Historical failure decay (mission-control style)
  • Avoid recently failed edges for a cooldown window

Learning objectives

  • Ingest a channel graph and invoice constraints
  • Rank paths with custom fee and reliability heuristics
  • Benchmark success rate against a baseline router

Prerequisites

  • Pathfinding
  • Failure Handling
  • Onion Routing

Required skills

PathfindingGraph algorithmsBenchmark harnesses

Part of the lightning roadmap.

Architecture diagram

Graph snapshot → scorer → path candidates → payment attempt feedback

Requirements

  • `POST /routes` accepts destination, amount, max fee, max CLTV
  • Returns ranked candidate paths with expected fees
  • At least two scoring strategies behind a flag
  • Deterministic routes for a fixed graph fixture
  • Comparison report: success rate, average fees, attempts

Stretch goals

  • Feedback endpoint for success/failure learning
  • Multipart / split payment path sets under a fee budget
  • Cooldown window for recently failed edges
  • Visualization of chosen vs rejected paths

Recommended resources

Example repositories

Submission instructions

  • Service repo with fixture graph and benchmark harness
  • Written report comparing strategies on the same dataset
  • API examples for route requests/responses
  • Clear limitations vs full node private-state routers