Zeus is a Self Custodial Lightning wallet with an imbedded LND node. When you create a new "Lightning Wallet", what you are doing is creating a private key on your phone for LNDMobile to run and then open a channel on the lightning network. I think by default it create a channel with Olympus by Zeus Lightning Node.

When you have a channel on the lightning network, you have to keep a reserve balance so you can pay the fees to close the channel on the layer 1.

The error message could be more clear imo to explain this. I had the same question when I started using it.

You can also use your own Lightning node and connect to it using REST or grpc. setuping your own bitcoin core and Lightning node is a great learning experience!

I really like Zeus wallet because it is so customisable and you can manage your own node with the UI.

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So is there any way for me to clear out most of those sats?

I have about 10 wallets and only played around with Zeus bc it was always taking too long to open. I run my own lightning node now with Alby so don’t want to use Zeus.

I am not sure how Alby work under the hoods, but I found a video on Youtube from nostr:npub1rxysxnjkhrmqd3ey73dp9n5y5yvyzcs64acc9g0k2epcpwwyya4spvhnp8 that show how to connect Zeus to your Alby lightning node. https://youtu.be/2Z1BzwxdP4I?si=pSOuQuUhGoz7gDbR&t=3141

Zeus app should open faster when using your own node instead of the embedded one because your node should already be synced, while I think the embedded LND node need to sync before opening. (Your mobile phone LND node is not always running in the background, but I think there is a settings named "Persistent LND" that make it run in the background.)

I think that to get all your sats back, you need to close the channel and you will be able to spend all your remaining sats on layer 1 in your on-chain wallet. (You will have to pay fees to close the channel)

Also I forgot to mention but in addition to the remaining minimum balance required to be able to close the channel, you have to set the max fee for a payment either as a percentage of the payment or a maximum set amount. So this is also taken in consideration.

So to recapitulate:

1. Your lightning channel need to keep a reserve balance to be able to close the channel. This prevent you to spend outbound liquidity.

2. When you try to make a payment, you have to have the max fee specified in addition to 1. In zeus you can specify the max fee just before the payment is made in settings sub-menu of the payment and you can also set the default value in the app settings.

Also if someone can confirm what I said, I am also still learning.

Thanks for all the info. I will check out the video. Here’s a few sats for your effort😀