Status: 25 September 2026
Scope: routing/pathfinding, channel selection, fee control, circular rebalancing, swaps, liquidity estimation, and high-signal research.
Evidence labels: deployed = shipping software; operational tool = runnable against real nodes; simulation/research = evaluated in a model, simulator, or graph snapshot.
- Today's strongest deployed “intelligence” is probabilistic routing plus rules and optimization—not autonomous AI. LND Mission Control, Core Lightning Askrene/XPay, LDK scoring, and Eclair's pathfinder learn from failures or score routes under uncertainty, but remain constrained numerical systems.
- Automatic balancing is four different activities: circular self-payments, submarine swaps, fee shaping, and capital/channel changes. Circular rebalances are cheapest when a good route exists; swaps are more dependable but add provider and on-chain costs; fee ch