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 (risk and compliance screening for Lightning operations), 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.

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.