Trim: Fee Level Matters More Than Skew in Lightning Routing

Overview & Synopsis

Lightning routing nodes lend their channel balance for a posted fee. Operators' tools move that fee with the balance around a hand-set level, and which part of the fee drives revenue is unclear. We present Trim, which models a channel as a two-sided inventory with costly refills. Its optimal fee is a level, set by demand and replenishment, plus a balance skew, the shadow price of liquidity. The level is first order: no fee rule beats the ceiling demand and replenishment set, and on exactly solved channels the best flat fee comes within $1.6\%$ of the optimum at the median, whereas a level off by a factor of two loses tens of percent. The skew is second-order insurance: it adds at most what the flow-balancing flat fee loses to refused forwards. So the level should be chosen: Trim's rule traces the revenue--success frontier, posts one level on every channel, and adds a skew only where refills stay frequent and costly. On a 2026 snapshot with synthetic payments, no tuned tool beats that frontier by over a few percent, and a skew changes gross revenue by a few percent.