Neutrino Remote Control

This tutorial assumes that you have already downloaded and installed Zap and created a wallet. If not, please head over to our getting started guide.

Zap installs lnd for you as part of the installation process. Zap will automatically start the internal lnd daemon for you when you select the default connection type during the on-boarding process. In this mode we run lnd as a light client called neutrino (BIP 157 & BIP 158) which allows us to run lnd without requiring a Bitcoin full node on your system - Instead, Zap will connect to one of Zap's hosted BTC full nodes in order to retrieve information from the blockchain.

Connecting to the lnd node

For some advanced use cases you may wish to connect directly to Zap's internal lnd daemon so that you can control it programmatically, without using the Zap user interface. There are two ways that you can do this:

gRPC

By default, we make lnd's gRPC interface accessible at localhost:11009.

Documentation for lnd's gRPC API is available here.

REST

By default, we make lnd's REST interface accessible at localhost:8180.

Documentation for lnd's REST API is available here.

TLS/SSL & Macaroons

Two things are needed in order to make a gRPC or HTTP request to an lnd instance: a TLS/SSL connection and a macaroon used for RPC authentication.

The macaroons for your lnd node will be located within your Zap data directory, found in one of the following locations:

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Zap/lnd/bitcoin/mainnet/wallet-1/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet
Linux: ~/.config/Zap/lnd/bitcoin/mainnet/wallet-1/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet
Windows: %APPDATA%\Zap\lnd\bitcoin\mainnet\wallet-1\data\chain\bitcoin\mainnet

Note: If you have created multiple wallets within Zap, the location may vary.

Connecting externally