Release notes from lightning

v25.12.1 Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience II

2026-01-16T02:23:10Z

This is a recommended point release, particularly for those creating new nodes.

Fixed

lightningd: we now correctly sign for non-taproot addresses given by nodes created by v25.12 or newer. ([#8831])
lightning-hsmtool: handle mnemonic hsm_secret files (nodes created >= v25.12). ([#8831])
plugins: pay can crash on errors returned from deep inside routehints. ([#8829])
plugins: askrene can crash on a corner case in increase_flows. ([#8829])
askrene: fix a plugin crash triggered during single path payments when a channel fees doesn't fit u32. ([#8832])
JSON-RPC: malformed filters no longer crash lightningd. ([#8780])
pay: maxdelay parameter now enforced for direct channel payments ([#8740])
gossipd: we would occasionally not show a node announcement in listnodes(). ([#8769])
lightningd: potential crash on startup if bitcoind isn't up-to-date. ([#8779])

Changed

JSON-RPC: recover takes a 12-word mnemonic for nodes created by v25.12 or later. ([#8830])
lightning-hsmtool: getsecret replaces getcodexsecret for modern nodes (gives mnemonic). ([#8830])

Deprecated

Note: You should always set allow-deprecated-apis=false to test for changes.

lightning-hsmtool: getcodexsecret. Use getsecret. ([#8830])

For more information, please see the changelog.

A shout out to acknowledge the significant efforts of the very cool Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @sangbida, @endothermicdev, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, and @niftynei

v25.12 Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience

2025-12-04T23:10:38Z

This release has been named by @sangbida

Highlights for Users

This release candidate includes a downgrade tool! lightningd-downgrade will downgrade your database from v25.12 to v25.09 if something goes wrong
New nodes will now be created with a BIP-39 12-word phrase as their root secret. BIP-39 12-word base functionality in lightning-hsmtool to support hsm_secret files.
We solved the case of the missing_utxo bug!!
We received great feedback about xpay and adjusted accordingly: which will no longer try to send too many HTLCs through unknown channels (6, as that is Phoenix's limit) unless it has no choice, we've fixed a clash with simultaneous payments via routehints and blinded paths and asked xpay to wait if it suspects a payment failure is due to a height disagreement with the final node.
Added askrene-bias-node: an RPC command to set a bias on node's outgoing or incoming channels.
Use the new networkevents subsystem to access information about peers: ping times and connection times.
We've configured an experimental-lsps-client and experimental-lsps2-service support for LSPS level 2 specification.

Highlights for Developers

There's a vast array of performance improvements for large nodes... Do not pass go. Go directly to the changelog!

Multiple significant speedups for large nodes have been added to lightningd, especially preventing "freezes" under exceptionally high load and helping it to handle large numbers of command outputs gracefully.
Postgres: significant speedup on read-only operations (e.g. 30% on empty SELECTs)

Protocol Updates

We now re-transmit unseen funding transactions on startup, for more robustness.
Stricter conformance to Bolt spec for splice commitments.

See the changelog for full details

Since 25.09 we’ve had 520 commits in 92 days by 24 authors

A special thanks to our four first time contributors:

@noblepayne
@claudio.raimondi
@botantony
@wqxoxo

An enormous thanks to the very cool Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @sangbida, @endothermicdev, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, and @niftynei

25.12 Release Candidate 3

2025-11-29T05:19:21Z

A critical and longstanding fix for missing UTXOs.

v25.12rc2 Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience

2025-11-28T01:52:27Z

Release Candidate 2 for Core Lightning v25.12

This release has been named by @sangbida

Highlights for Users

This release candidate includes a downgrade tool! lightningd-downgrade will downgrade your database from v25.12 to v25.09 if something goes wrong
New nodes will now be created with a BIP-39 12-word phrase as their root secret. BIP-39 12-word base functionality in lightning-hsmtool to support hsm_secret files.
We received great feedback about xpay and adjusted accordingly: which will no longer try to send too many HTLCs through unknown channels (6, as that is Phoenix's limit) unless it has no choice, we've fixed a clash with simultaneous payments via routehints and blinded paths and asked xpay to wait if it suspects a payment failure is due to a height disagreement with the final node.
Added askrene-bias-node: an RPC command to set a bias on node's outgoing or incoming channels.
Use the new networkevents subsystem to access information about peers: ping times and connection times.
We've configured an experimental-lsps-client and experimental-lsps2-service support for LSPS level 2 specification.

Highlights for Developers

There's a vast array of performance improvements for large nodes... go directly to the change log!

Multiple significant speedups for large nodes have been added to lightningd, especially preventing "freezes" under exceptionally high load and helping it to handle large numbers of command outputs gracefully.
xpay will not try to send too many HTLCs through unknown channels (6, as that is Phoenix's limit) unless it has no choice
Postgres: significant speedup on read-only operations (e.g. 30% on empty SELECTs)

Protocol Updates

We now re-transmit unseen funding transactions on startup, for more robustness.
Stricter conformance to Bolt spec for splice commitments.

See the changelog for full details

Since 25.09 we’ve had 480 commits in 82 days by 23 authors
A special thanks to our three first time contributors:

@noblepayne
@[email protected]">[email protected]
@botantony

An enormous thanks to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @sangbida, @endothermicdev, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, and @niftynei

v25.05.1

2025-11-25T22:32:49Z

25.05.1: xpay fixes, mainly.

v25.12rc1 Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience

2025-11-25T04:32:37Z

Release Candidate 1 for Core Lightning v25.12

This release has been named by @sangbida

Highlights for Users

New nodes will now be created with a BIP-39 12-word phrase as their root secret. BIP-39 12-word base functionality in lightning-hsmtool to support hsm_secret files.
We received great feedback about xpay and adjusted accordingly: which will no longer try to send too many HTLCs through unknown channels (6, as that is Phoenix's limit) unless it has no choice, we've fixed a clash with simultaneous payments via routehints and blinded paths and asked xpay to wait if it suspects a payment failure is due to a height disagreement with the final node.
Added askrene-bias-node: an RPC command to set a bias on node's outgoing or incoming channels.
Use the new networkevents subsystem to access information about peers: ping times and connection times.
We've configured an experimental-lsps-client and experimental-lsps2-service support for LSPS level 2 specification.

Highlights for Developers

There's a vast array of performance improvements for large nodes... go directly to the change log!

Multiple significant speedups for large nodes have been added to lightningd, especially preventing "freezes" under exceptionally high load and helping it to handle large numbers of command outputs gracefully.
xpay will not try to send too many HTLCs through unknown channels (6, as that is Phoenix's limit) unless it has no choice
Postgres: significant speedup on read-only operations (e.g. 30% on empty SELECTs)

Protocol Updates

We now re-transmit unseen funding transactions on startup, for more robustness.
Stricter conformance to Bolt spec for splice commitments.

See the changelog for full details

Since 25.09 we’ve had 480 commits in 82 days by 23 authors

A special thanks to our three first time contributors:

@noblepayne
@[email protected]">[email protected]
@botantony

An enormous thanks to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @sangbida, @endothermicdev, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, and @niftynei

v25.09.3 Hot Wallet Guardian

2025-11-07T03:05:16Z

v25.09.3 Hot Wallet Guardian IV

Fixed

Docker image was missing SQLite library

See the changelog for a full list.

Thank you to the valuable Core Lightning open source community for your ongoing contributions.

And as always, thank you to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @endothermicdev, @sangbida, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, @niftynei and @madelinevibes

v25.09.2 Hot Wallet Guardian

2025-11-05T01:56:57Z

v25.09.2 Hot Wallet Guardian II

Bookkeeper and xpay users: please upgrade! This point release includes fixes for xpay, bookkeeper and optimisations for large nodes using bookkeeper.

Changed

Bookkeeper reduced logging for large imports to increase speed.
SQL initial load for tables is much faster (e.g 82 to 17 seconds for very large channelmoves table).

Fixed

Core lightning builds for Ubuntu Focal, Jammy and Noble are deterministic again.
Bookkeeper first invocation after migration from prior to 25.09 with very large databases will not crash.
xpay payment parts status will not be pending in failure cases (as seen in listpays or listsendpays).
Askrene would not enter an infinite loop.
bcli would fail with "Argument list too long" when sending a giant tx.
Dealing with giant PSBTs (700 inputs!) is now much faster.
Assertion crash in bookkeeper when fresh records arrive while multiple queries in progress.
Bookkeeper now correctly restores chain event blockheights it has derived.

See the changelog for a full list.

Thank you to the valuable Core Lightning open source community for your ongoing contributions.

And as always, thank you to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @endothermicdev, @sangbida, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3 and @niftynei

v25.09.1 Hot Wallet Guardian

2025-10-17T01:02:53Z

v25.09.1 Hot Wallet Guardian II

Several important fixes have been addressed in this release, please upgrade!

bookkeeper: failed reload of rebalances on restart
JSON-RPC: listchainmoves could contain bogus duplicate entries after 25.09 bookkeeper migration
Fixed compilation on all target architectures; each had their own bugs (poetry, missing packages...)
lightningd: potential crash when we receive a malformed onion complain from our first peer when using sendonion / injectpaymentonion
Fixed the db: migration time to help with reasonable size account databases
We now build on MacOS without errors on the latest Command Line Tools (macOS 15 SDK)
Added gossip_store recovery for filesystems which do not synchronize read and write (e.g. ZFS on Linux), by disabling mmap reads and rewriting the last records in gossipd
Improved build time and reduces the Docker image size

See the changelog for a full list.

Note: the clnrest plugin inside the Ubuntu binary builds are not reproducible, because of #8547 (which will be in the next release). The binary changes between builds are minimal and have been validated by hand for this release.

Thank you to the valuable Core Lightning open source community for your ongoing contributions.

And as always, thank you to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @endothermicdev, @sangbida, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3 and @niftynei

v25.09 Hot Wallet Guardian

2025-09-02T08:51:50Z

Core Lightning v25.09

This release has been named by @king-11.

Note: release schedule moved one month: this is v25.09, and all deprecations incremented accordingly

Highlights for Users

bookkeeper has been migrated into core lightning, allowing visibility into payments, fees and channel activities.
xpay can now directly pay BIP353 addresses (like ₿[email protected]">[email protected]) and simple offers without extra steps.
fetchinvoice is now more reliable.
Better feedback when channel creation fails due to capacity limits.
New browser tool for viewing CLN log files.
Rust-based wss-proxy with better multi-address support.
Now limiting the number of parts a payment can be split on xpay and askrene

Highlights for Developers

bookkeeper plugin functionality is now integrated into Core Lightning with native listchainmoves and listchannelmoves commands, unified database storage, SQL query support, and real-time notifications for better financial auditability.
Reckless now supports the modern uv package manager for Python plugins.
Speaking of uv, we've transitioned away from poetry, now using uv.
getroutes now accepts maxparts parameter to limit payment splitting for better route control.
Flexible API responses - clnrest can return data in XML, YAML, or form-encoded formats beyond JSON.
libplugin now allows synchronous calls at any time.
Improvements to the rate of feasible solutions found in the main loop of the solver on askrene
To increase the runtime, we've refactored the minimum cost flow solver, pruning some network arcs and reducing the internal unit of account.

Protocol Updates

Splicing improvements allow for better compatibility with Eclair and continuous routing during channel modifications.
Improve security by ensuring all peers must support channel type.
Payment secrets now mandatory in BOLT11 invoices for better payment protection.

See the changelog for full details

Since 25.05 we’ve had 321 commits in 76 days by 16 authors

A special thanks to the four first time contributors:
@Chand-ra
@sangbida
@MicahMaphet
@longhutianjie

An enormous thanks to the Core Lightning team:
@rustyrussell, @ShahanaFarooqui, @endothermicdev, @cdecker, @nepet, @Lagrang3, @sangbida and @niftynei