Services · liquidity

Amboss (Magma)

A Lightning channel-liquidity marketplace — buy inbound capacity from a public market with one API call (or an MIT MCP server), no account needed.

What it is

Amboss is a Lightning Network infrastructure company; its agent-relevant product is Magma, a marketplace for channel liquidity. A node that needs inbound liquidity — the capacity to receive payments — buys a channel from a seller who locks up bitcoin to open it and earns yield for the lease term. Magma never takes custody: it escrows the deal with a HODL invoice, so the seller is paid only if it actually opens the channel. For an autonomous agent that earns over Lightning, this is the deployed answer to the inbound-liquidity problem — paid-for capacity to receive, on demand, without running a liquidity desk.

Two things make it agent-drivable: a public GraphQL API (no account needed to buy) and an MIT-licensed MCP server (@ambosstech/magma-mcp) that exposes the whole purchase as a single buy_lightning_liquidity tool. Magma is one product in a broader Amboss stack: Magma AI (a recommender that suggests which peers and sizes to buy — a recommender, not a hands-off rebalancer; its placement model was published as MPFlow, arXiv 2607.08703, a graph-RL policy the paper reports running across ~$16M of channel opens over 30 managed nodes), Rails (self-custodial liquidity-provider yield — the sell side), Reflex (API automation for a node you run), Amboss Payments (multi-asset BTC/USDT/USDC send-receive-settle over an LND node), RailsX (a Lightning-native P2P DEX for BTC↔stablecoin swaps), and a Lightning explorer/analytics suite.

When to use it

• Giving an agent inbound liquidity so it can receive Lightning payments without hand-picking channel partners.
• Buying a channel programmatically — sized in dollars, paid in sats — from inside an agent’s own workflow.
• Earning yield on idle bitcoin by selling liquidity (the sell side, via Magma sellers or Rails).

It buys new inbound capacity from a third party — distinct from Loop, which moves an agent’s own balance between Lightning and L1. Once you have capacity, Reflex is the software that automates ongoing routing and liquidity management.

Dependencies

Your own Lightning node — LND, Core Lightning, or Eclair — reachable at its connection URI (pubkey@host:port, from getinfo), plus funds to pay the lease invoice. The buy path is a public GraphQL mutation (liquidity.buy at magma.amboss.tech/graphql): no Amboss account and no API key are required — anonymous buyers receive a session_key to track the order. An optional MAGMA_API_KEY (from an Amboss account) adds persistent history. Amboss’s other GraphQL APIs (Space/Reflex analytics, Rails) are key-gated, and Amboss does not permit commercial use of its free APIs — confirm terms for production use.

Quick start

Estimate with the public liquidity_per_usd query, then call the public liquidity.buy mutation with your node’s connection_uri and usd_cents (minimum 500 = $5); pay the returned HODL invoice from your node and poll get_order until VALID_CHANNEL_OPENING. Or skip the GraphQL plumbing and run the MIT MCP server — npm install -g @ambosstech/magma-mcp — which wraps the flow as one buy_lightning_liquidity tool (it runs over stdio as a local subprocess; it is not a hosted endpoint). Docs at docs.amboss.tech/developer; marketplace at magma.amboss.tech.

Gotchas

• You still need a node. Magma opens a channel to your node — it presupposes an LND/CLN/Eclair node and funds; it is not a custodial “receive without infrastructure” path. To skip channel management entirely, the L3 ecash route (Cashu) is the lighter alternative.
• Magma AI is a recommender, not an autopilot. It suggests peers and sizing; it does not continuously rebalance the node for you.
• The lease is time-bounded. A bought channel is leased for a term — plan for renewal or replacement rather than treating inbound liquidity as permanent.
• Free-API commercial limit. The public buy path is fine, but Amboss’s free analytics APIs are not licensed for commercial use — clear production terms with Amboss.
• A marketplace is not a guarantee. Sellers and pricing vary; Magma runs a reputation system, but verify before relying on any single counterparty.