A platform to analyze real-time and historic gossip of the Bitcoin Lightning NetworkA platform to analyze real-time and historic gossip of the Bitcoin Lightning Network

@fabian.kraus been following the discussions about Delving Bitcoin
Gossip Observer: New project to monitor the Lightning P2P network exploring the options on improving the gossip protocol and wanted to contribute some empirical data. He participated at Summer-of-Bitcoin 2025 and worked together with René Pickhardt to build the tool: https://ln-history.info to monitor, analyse and persist the gossip messages of the Lightning Network.

He run two Core Lightning nodes (Alice and Bob) in default configuration, meaning ~10 peers to receive gossip from. Every gossip messages that is appended to the gossip_store file gets timestamped and saved in a database.

Here are some observations for the period: 2026-01-14 to 2026-02-08

1. Delay between the message’s internal timestamp and the time it reached the collector node.

2. Comparison of the unique message sets of the two nodes: Do both nodes see the same network?

3. He tracked the session duration for every peer the collector node has received gossip messages from. Core Lightning chooses the peers.

The platform is running quite stable now. If you’re working on gossip-v2 or sync improvements and have a specific question or a query you would like me to run against this data, please let me know → He's happy to help analyse it!

Source: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/gossip-observer-new-project-to-monitor-the-lightning-p2p-network/2105/21

Repo: https://github.com/ln-history