Diamond Hands Routing Rewards (March 2022)

As we unofficially announced in various online groups(Plebnet, Ring of Fire etc) the past few weeks, the Diamond Hands community have distributed routing rewards for March to all participating routing nodes.

Diamond Hands is the largest Lightning Network user community in Japan. We run a large Lightning routing node ourselves as well as help other node operators get started and route more efficiently, mostly in Japan so far.

Here is the Top 100 list for the March routing rewards. We have paid out the total of 2 million sats for the March campaign. Including those not on the list, we have sent out routing rewards through keysend to over 350 qualifying nodes.

In order to participate in our reward campaign,

1. Open a channel to the Diamond Hands node and provide inbound liquidity to us
2. Keep the channel open at the time of distribution

That’s all. Basically, all you need to do to qualify is open a channel to the Diamond Hands node and stay put. Very simple.

Why do we give away sats to other nodes?

Because that’s how we started building the Diamond Hands community in Japan in June 2021, and it worked really well for us and the community even beyond our expectation. It adds extra motivation for routing node operators to keep their node active or start running their Lightning nodes for the first time.

Our current sponsors

Responding to our effort, we are now sponsored by some of the top crypto companies in Japan and the routing rewards come from this funding.
(bitbank, Kraken Japan, bitFlyer Blockchain, Fulgur Ventures Japan, AndGo, Coinbase Japan and Nayuta)

So, shoutout to our sponsors and we are also going to add a few more sponsors globally in the coming weeks as well.

(If there are any other companies interested in the initiative, feel free to drop us a line from the contact form or message me on Twitter)

We were limiting this campaign to Japanese users until now, but we expand this to any qualifying nodes and try to “connect the world” further going forward(shoutout to the Ring of Fire community as well)

For those wondering, the reward distribution is based on participation(all qualifying nodes receive the same amount), channel size and routing volume. Right now, we use a rather simple formula to calculate these scores, but we plan to come up with a more soshisticated scoring system in the future to identify “quality nodes” for us and reward them accordingly. This itself is an interesting topic to ponder, so I’ll write up more on this later.

There are also other cool news, updates and new initiatives we are taking on now to put Lightning on the map in Japan and Asia more broadly. We’ll share more details later when we’re ready.

Anyways, that’s it for this time and I’m personally very excited about the recent development and adoption of Lightning. Stay tuned and happy routing!