I have 5800 sats in Zeus but it keeps saying insufficient funds when I try to drain the wallet. How can I get it all out?
I’ll send you 2000 sats if you show me💰
Discussion
Is the transactional fee making it higher then the amount you have in there?
It doesn’t even show me the fee.
Even if I try to send 10 sats it still says not enough balance.
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.
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😀
If I understood correctly, you had satoshis in a channel that was opened in the Zeus wallet. You simply needed to close the channel if you wanted to withdraw everything completely, and in that case, after some time, when one or two confirmations pass, the funds return to the on-chain wallet inside the Zeus wallet itself.
The fact that you couldn't spend such a small balance is because those satoshis are in the reserve part of the channel. About one percent of the channel size is reserved. So if your balance falls below one percent of the channel size that was opened for you, you won't be able to use those satoshis until you close the channel.