Flow 1.0 Channel FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions for Flow
You must have the Pool daemon installed to claim a sidecar ticket. The Pool service needs to communicate with your node to facilitate channel openings. It uses the Pool daemon to do this.
Once you have a sidecar ticket from Flow, this can be claimed by anyone. For this reason it's important to not share it with anyone unless you intentionally want to give that person a channel.
For your order to be filled it must be included in a Pool batch. These get created every 10 minutes. However sometimes it can take multiple batches before you get matched with someone.
When creating an order for Flow, there's a field in the request called
self_chan_balance. This is the amount of satoshis you want on your side of the channel. For example, when you could request a 1,000,000 satoshi channel with 50,000 satoshis on your side. Of course, when requesting liquidity on the outbound side, you must contribute the amount up front that will be a part of the channel. At this time you can only pay for your channel in Bitcoin. However, paying with services like Strike make it very easy to do the conversion.
A coupon is good for a set amount of Satoshis. When using a coupon it applies as much of the coupon as it can, but coupons can only be used once. For example, if your coupon value was 1000 and your amount due was 1254, then you would owe 254 sats. Also, if you had the same coupon but your order value was 798 then your order would be free but you also forfeit the remaining balance of that coupon.
Currently when you cancel an order that you've paid for we generate a coupon that's equal to the same amount you paid. You can then use this coupon on a new order to apply your balance. However if you'd like to get your sats back instead of a coupon please contact us.
When creating orders we have a
node_tier field in the request. The possible values are any and best. By default, we use best. This maps to the node tiering system in Pool. best means that the node must be on the BOS Score list. any means there is no restrictions on the node and it could be anyone. This lets you tell the system who to get channels from so you can be sure to purchase them from the best nodes on the network.Yes, if your order sits in the
waiting_payment status of 1 hour without being paid then your order will expire. As soon as you pay for the order it will no longer expire.When your order is in the
submitted status that means the order was submitted to the Pool auction service and it's waiting to be matched. This can take some time depending on much liquidity is on the sell side of Pool. If your order is stuck in submitted for a long time you can cancel the order and create a new one. This would allow also make sure all the fee sets are updated with the most recent batches.Last modified 1mo ago