Today, I got back to working on "askrene" for Core Lighting. The idea is to extract the core logic of the experimental "renepay" plug-in into an Oracle you can ask for routes (and provide feedback on what happened). This is much more composable: anyone can write a plugin which uses this information, *or* an alternate pathfinding plugin to replace it.

It's built around the idea of "layers" which are where information lives: you tell it what layers to use when you ask for a set of routes. This has many uses: you might have route hints or blinded paths you want (or have to!) use. You might want to constrain a payment to a particular channel for rebalancing, etc.

In theory, these layers can be exported and imported: you can share information about the state of the network between nodes. I'm sure there's a pile of obfuscation needed to preserve privacy in this case, but it's an interesting idea...