How your node fell into the dead pool and how to get it out

Have you noticed that your node isn't forwarding payments to most of your channel peers, even despite that you have set very low fee rates on those channels? Do you have channel peers who also have set very low fee rates toward you but still never forward any payments your way? Your node likely has fallen into the Lightning Network's dead pool, a stagnant region from which liquidity never flows out.

Your node fell into the dead pool because you opened channels to sink nodes and allowed your liquidity to drain out to them. Sure, you may have earned some forwarding fees in the process of forwarding payments to them. You may even have earned significant forwarding fees if you had set your fee rates aggressively enough. However, those earnings are a one-time, scant consolation for what was really happening to your node, which is that it was being flushed into the dead pool.

Once you're in the dead pool, you will find it difficult to acquire any new, low-fee, incoming liquidity from well-connected nodes. The reason is that they want to avoid your node's dragging them into the dead pool too, and the only way that they can prevent that is to not let you drain their liquidity. Consequently, while in the dead pool, you will find that most/all of your incoming liquidity is from other nodes that are also in the dead pool.

Within the dead pool, liquidity flows in only one direction: toward the drains. The drains are services that suck in liquidity from all channels opened toward them and then close those channels to move the sats back on chain. Typically they are exchanges and loop-out services. Kraken and LOOP are huge drains. The drains will take everything you can throw at them, even if you're charging obscene fee rates. They will practically never send anything back your way, and if they do, it's only along the cheapest of your cheap routes, so you'll make just a few sats here and there, and immediately they'll suck right back anything they might have trickled over to you.

If you open enough capacity to drains, your node will become a sink. A sink is a node whose liquidity mostly flows to drains. The biggest sinks are the services that provide liquidity to retailers that, in turn, sell off the sats they receive (rather than recirculating them into the ecosystem). LQwD is a big sink, as was ZeroFeeRouting before they shut down. Anyone who opens too much capacity toward sinks and drains without setting obscenely high fees on those channels will become a sink themselves. It's contagious. This is why you can't get out of the dead pool organically.

The only help you may get from random other node operators is from those who don't know that they are harming their own nodes by opening to you. You might think that you can claw your way out by paying for incoming liquidity from the big liquidity providers, but no, that won't work because they are sinks themselves, and thus all of their incoming liquidity from the healthy portion of the network is at obscenely high fee rates (because those nodes don't want to become sinks too). The only thing you can do to get out of the dead pool is to reverse the process that got you into it, and you will pay dearly for this — much more than you “earned” as you fell into it.