There are a number of factors that make a good node but the actual criteria of how they are scored is a bit opaque. This is intentional to prevent people from all optimizing for high scores and to encouraged to experiment with different strategies. This wouldn’t be an issue if the scores are just an interesting curiosity but BOS is used as a metric to rank nodes for selling liquidity and opening channels.
BOS
Lightning Labs Performance Ranking
Builder’s guide
So question is, what exactly is required to make it into BOS? Looking to quantify the requirements to better understand what it takes to be T1 for lightning pool. So far from what I can gather:
- Stability - Pretty easy to understand this one. Need close to 100% uptime. Performance Ranking drops dramatically for any downtime. Currently a bunch of nodes that were previously high are all below 500 now due to being “Unstable”, possibly due to recent umbrel update?
- Age - Need to be around long enough to show you aren’t just going to disappear. Most BOS nodes are at least 5 months old. Channel age appears to be important as well, nodes with mostly young channels are uncommon in rankings.
- Large Channels - Most recommendations for minimum channel sizes is around 1M but for routing, larger channels are required. At least 3-5M channels to a few good peers. Prime example is raiju, it is BOS listed and high in performance rankings even though it’s only 2 months old, centrality is low, and only 12 channels.
What else is important to have to be high ranked?