Ideally, we'd connect to all top-capacity nodes — ACINQ, Wallet of Satoshi, Binance, Kraken — but that requires locking up a lot of funds. If you have that money, this article isn't for you.

This article describes how to achieve moderate connectivity for your Lightning node with minimal investment.

The idea is simple: instead of connecting to every top-capacity node, find a single node that is best connected to the top 50 capacity nodes, and connect to it. Your node will then be two hops away from most of the top 50.The table below shows a node’s connectivity to the top 50 nodes.

“Direct connections” is the number of top-50 nodes that have a direct channel to that node.

“Connectivity score” is a metric that also counts multi-hop connections with reduced weights (2-hop connections k = 0.5, 3-hop k ≈ 0.33, etc.).

I also added a “minimum channel capacity” column, found by attempting to open a channel with each node. Large nodes often require considerably higher minimum capacities.

All table data is current. It was collected in September 2025.

How I obtained the data

I wrote a script that uses a public API to get the top-50 capacity nodes and query hop counts between node pairs. I made too many queries and the API provider disabled access. I plan to use another method to check node pairs in the future.If you’re interested in the Python code or future improvements, leave a comment and I’ll share it.