Services · liquidity

Amboss Rails

A self-custodial Lightning liquidity-provision service — put idle bitcoin to work as routing liquidity and earn yield, driven by a GraphQL API.

What it is

Amboss Rails is the provide-side of the Lightning liquidity market: it puts idle bitcoin to work as routing liquidity and earns yield from the payment flow that crosses it. Where Magma is where a node buys inbound capacity, Rails is where a node offers capacity and gets paid for it — automated through a GraphQL API rather than hand-managed channels. It is self-custodial: the bitcoin stays under your own keys, deployed as liquidity, not handed to Amboss.

It is the yield engine in the Amboss + Voltage payments stack — the layer that attracts and optimizes the capital that makes fast, low-cost Lightning payments possible.

When to use it

• A treasury or agent holds idle bitcoin and wants yield from routing without giving up custody.
• You want the sell side of the liquidity market programmatically — provide capacity, earn fees — rather than picking channels by hand.
• You’re running Lightning payment infrastructure and want liquidity managed dynamically against demand.

Dependencies & payment

A node / self-custodied bitcoin to deploy as liquidity, plus an Amboss account and API key. The API is a GraphQL endpoint at rails.amboss.tech/graphql, authenticated with a bearer token. There is no fee to consume on the buyer side; as a provider you earn yield from routing fees on the liquidity you supply. As with Amboss’s other APIs, commercial use of the free tier is not permitted — confirm terms for production.

Quick start

Create an API key in your Amboss account, then POST GraphQL to rails.amboss.tech/graphql with Authorization: Bearer <API_KEY> to configure and run liquidity provision; yield accrues from the routing fees on the capacity you supply. Exact mutations are documented at docs.amboss.tech/developer.

Gotchas

• Yield is variable. Routing income depends on payment demand across your liquidity — it is not a fixed rate.
• Self-custodial means you run the infrastructure. Your bitcoin stays yours, but so does the operational responsibility for the node providing it.
• Free-API commercial limit. Amboss does not license free-API access for commercial use — clear production terms with Amboss.