Obtaining Lightning network graph data

I was wondering if it is possible for me to obtain data about the Lightning network mainnet, particularly the nodes and the edges (channels) in the network. I know that the graph is visualized in explorers such as https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ and https://graph.lndexplorer.com/. I wish to obtain the data itself so I can reconstruct the graph and run some network simulations for my research. I understand that the standard way is to run a Lightning node yourself and then sync for the network's topology through your node. However, I do not have access to the computational resources and memory to run a full Lightning node.

If anyone knows of a way I can obtain the data without having to run a Lightning node, or has the data and is willing to share it for purely research purposes, it would be of tremendous help.

Thank you!

antimornings

Posted 2018-06-13T04:01:45.047

Reputation: 41

Answers

Here's a snapshot of the listchannels output on c-lightning as of Feb 19 2018 https://gist.github.com/coinables/4f29d85c3902b3d8b0d929cd318af3f9

And same time as above but the output is for listnodes https://gist.github.com/coinables/19223b8bf09a24a3a6e8240433df04bf

With these two data sets you should be able to create a simple nodes & edges relationship chart. Here's a very rough example using sigma.js, but the performance is quite poor. https://gist.github.com/coinables/034003b80148e88f68c641950ff08956

m1xolyd1an

Posted 2018-06-13T04:01:45.047

Reputation: 3 356

Some nodes in nodes.json have empty addresses. What does it mean? – Sergei Tikhomirov – 2019-06-11T08:32:57.467

https://ln.alhur.es/ provides a download link for their historical channel database from this link: https://ln.alhur.es/static/channels.db

Data starts June 2019 and provided by https://twitter.com/fiatjaf

pseudozach

Posted 2018-06-13T04:01:45.047

Reputation: 67