Using this guide, you'll be able to start a brand new team, spool up a lightning node, and go all the way to receiving your first Lightning Payment.

After you make an account, you will be greeted with the Welcome! onboarding screen. You will automatically have a team and the team name will be your email address. Click +New Team if you would like to have another. A team can be thought of as a sub-account in which you can deploy infrastructure or invite collaborators. Click your account icon in the upper right and you will be able to access your account or documentation.

When you click the New Team button, you will be asked to give your Team a name and upload an image(optional).

After you click continue you can then Launch some infrastructure, edit your team, or invite others to your team. If you invite others, make sure that they have an account made with Voltage using their own unique login first.

Before you can add more collaborators to your team, make sure they make an account on Voltage first and verify their email through the signup process.

To add collaborators to your team, click the Team option on the left side menu, and then Add New User. From there you can enter in the email of who you want to invite. Then you can give them specific permissions such as read only, etc. When those are configured confirm the invite and send it and they will receive a team invite.

A node is your own server that is used to facilitate your transactions. It's the cornerstone of all integrations with the Lightning Network.

Once you are logged in, navigate to our Nodes site at https://app.voltage.cloud.

To start creating a new node, click the 'Create Node' button. When asked what you want to deploy, select 'Lightning Node'.



You'll be asked what kind of node you want to create. Lightning Nodes use a shared bitcoin node in most cases.



For more information on Compute credits, check out our Billing FAQ.

If you are not ready to deploy a mainnet node, you can deploy a Mutinynet test environment node instead! To do this click Mutinynet as your node type on the deployment screen. More information on Mutinynet can be found here.

As a final step, you will be asked to give your node a name and password. Fill in the required fields and then click 'Create' once more.

Voltage can't see the password that you set and we are not able to recover a node due to a lost password. Due to this, please write down and safely secure your seed phrase immediately upon deploying your node!

After you click 'Create', you'll be directed to the node's primary Voltage dashboard. It typically takes 2 minutes or less to create a node and it will be ready to use right away. As soon as the node's status hits running it's ready to use!



Lightning Channels are the way that nodes on the network are able to transact with each other. You must create at least 1 payment channel to be able to send or receive transactions. Voltage offers free channel creation as part of the platform. Let's create a channel you can receive a payment!



NOTE: The rest of this guide assumes you are on mainnet. If you are running a mutinynet node, you can claim mutinynet coin from the faucet on the node dashboard.

After you click the 'Yes, please' button, you should see a message that states your channel is opening. Your channel opening must go through a few steps to be broadcasted to the Bitcoin network. As soon as you reach the state of 'Your new channel is pending', this means it's been successful but we need to wait for 3 onchain confirmations to use it. To track the confirmations of the transactions click 'Watch the process here'.

Once the transaction has 3 confirmations, the channel is ready to use! You should see a message stating that the channel has been opened. At this point we are ready to receive a payment.

We strongly recommend having more than just the free channel so your node is more reliable. You can check out our outbound/inbound guides for more information.

In the Lightning Network, payments are facilitated by what's called Invoices. An Invoice is just what it sounds like, a request for a payment from someone else. Let's generate an invoice so we can test receiving a payment.

To generate an invoice, you need to ask your node to generate one. There is many ways to communicate with your node, including UIs, APIs, and CLIs. For this tutorial, we'll us a UI tool called Thunderhub. If you want to learn how to use the APIs, see step 6.

To open the Thunderhub instance for your node, click on the Thunderhub Icon on your dashboard to provision. After a few seconds, it will show as Running.

When you open up Thunderhub, it will ask you for the node's password to unlock the Thunderhub instance. After it's unlocked, you'll be in the Thunderhub UI which allows you to view information about your node, as well as perform actions. Let's generate an invoice here. Simply click the 'Receive' button with a Lightning Bolt next to it to generate a Lightning Invoice. It will ask for an amount. You can enter any amount but let's use 1,000 in order to receive 1,000 sats. Then click 'Create Invoice'.

Thunderhub will then create you an invoice and display it. This is what you would give to someone else to pay so you can receive a payment. You've successfully created an invoice!

If you are running testnet, you can use a site like htlc.me to send a testnet payment with this invoice. Open htlc.me in another browser window and you should see a balance with a 'Send' tab. You can paste this invoice into the 'Lightning Request' field on the site in the Send tab then click 'Send Payment'. Assuming a successful payment, you just made a Lightning payment! Now you can refresh your Thunderhub dashboard and you should see a 1,000 sat balance in your wallet. Keep in mind that testnet can be unreliable and the payment may actually fail. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with your node.

Now that you have a channel and you've made a payment, let's talk about how we can get better details about our node. We've created a tool specifically for getting better data and insights from your node, called Surge. You can install Surge on your node to easily track transactions, view balances, and debug issues.

To install Surge, navigate back to your node's home page. At the top of your dashboard you will see a toggle. To enable Surge, flip the toggle on. Keep in mind that using Surge consumes API credits.



After you toggle Surge into the on position, you will get a pop up explaining what surge is and how it is used. If you accept, enter your node password to confirm.



Surge gives you all the details about what's happening inside of your node. It's a single pane of glass into everything you'll need to know. Surge can take up to an hour to populate all the data because it's a time-series solution. Learn more: Surge Analytics FAQ

In Step 4 we generated an invoice with Thunderhub, a GUI tool for your node. While GUI tools like Thunderhub are helpful for management or maintenance of a node, most applications and services integrate with nodes via APIs.

We expose both gRPC and REST APIs for the nodes that run inside of Voltage and customers have access to all endpoints. You can find the API Documentation for your node here:

https://lightning.engineering/api-docs/api/lnd/

With the API you are able to programmatically open channels, send and receive payments, and much more. Additionally, given we expose the full LND APIs to our customers, you can connect any application, service, or tool into your Voltage node that support the LND APIs. These are things like lncli, mobile wallets, rebalancing tools, and more.

You can also find more Developer information on our docs site under the Developer Resources category.

As you start to send and receive more transactions, you'll likely need to start creating multiple payment channels. To learn more about how to create and manage these payment channels, check out our Inbound Liquidity guide.

For automated liquidity services, check out Voltage LSP.

For other ways to get liquidity, we recommend checking out Lightning Network + and Amboss Magma as well. If you are looking to do Liquidity Swaps, you can use Lightning Terminal which is built in to your Voltage node interface. Learn how to Start Terminal Web.

Our team is ready and eager to help with any of your questions or needs. Please contact us with any inquiries at hello@voltage.cloud.

We are happy to work with you on your use case and understand how Voltage can best serve you. We additionally offer a full suite of management services under our Enterprise License.

For technical support, fill out our support for at https://voltage.cloud/support or email support@voltage.cloud We also have a fantastic community Discord Server to chat with other Voltage users or get Developer assistance.