Lightning Network Daemon (lnd)

LND (Lightning Network Daemon) is one of the major Lightning Network implementations, developed by Lightning Labs. Its first alpha release came out in January 2017, and it is written in Go. In a study of public-network data from March 2018 to January 2020, about 87% of public nodes ran LND. "Node-in-a-box" products package it too: Umbrel's own Lightning Node app runs LND, and RaspiBlitz can run it alongside Core Lightning.

How it compares to the other major implementations:

• LND (Lightning Labs) - Go, REST + gRPC APIs, monolithic. The largest share of public nodes in the study above.
• Core Lightning (Blockstream) - C, plugin-first architecture, built to be lightweight.
• Eclair (ACINQ) - Scala, aimed at server deployments such as routing nodes. ACINQ's mobile wallet runs on a separate ACINQ implementation, lightning-kmp.
• LDK - a library you embed in your own app rather than running as a daemon. Used by Cash App and Alby Hub, among others.

LND specifics:

• APIs. REST and gRPC interfaces make integration straightforward for wallets and services.
• Watchtower support. LND can run a watchtower for others, or hand a tower encrypted penalty transactions for its own channels, so a cheating channel partner can still be punished while you're offline.
• Macaroon-based auth. Fine-grained capability tokens for delegated access (e.g., letting a wallet query balance but not spend).
• One notable caveat: as of October 2026, LND does not natively support BOLT-12 offers. The LNDK shim project enables BOLT-12 alongside an LND deployment, but native support is still in progress.

CLN, by contrast, has had BOLT-12 offers switched on by default since December 2024.