Lightning
decoder.

Standard

BOLT11

spec-vector verified

Networks

mainnet · testnet · signet · regtest

Network calls

None

decodes locally

Auth

None

no wallet, no signup

/30—BOLT11 INVOICE DECODER

ready

▸ /notes

An invoice is a request, not a secret.

Anyone who sees an invoice can pay it; nothing worse. The secret that settles the payment, the preimage, stays with the recipient until the money is locked in along the route.

Expiry is short on purpose.

Invoices default to one hour and payment-terminal invoices often live for seconds or minutes, because the recipient pins liquidity expectations to them. Always check the expiry row before paying an invoice someone sent earlier.

Off-chain fees are a different animal.

Lightning routing fees are per-hop and usually tiny, unrelated to on-chain sat/vB rates. The on-chain market only matters when a channel opens or closes; the fee explainer covers that side.

▸ /faq

Is it safe to paste an invoice here?

Yes: decoding runs entirely in your browser with no network requests, and an invoice is a payment request, not a secret. Whoever sees it can pay it, nothing worse. The preimage that releases the payment never appears in the invoice.

Why does the amount say "any amount"?

Invoices without an amount in the prefix are valid and common for donations: the payer chooses what to send. Amounts, when present, are encoded in the prefix down to millisatoshi precision.

What is the payment hash for?

It commits the route to a secret preimage held by the recipient. Every hop locks funds against the same hash, and revealing the preimage on settlement releases the whole path atomically. Your wallet shows the preimage as proof of payment afterward.

Why is there no destination address?

Lightning pays to a node public key, not an address. Many invoices omit even that field, because the key is recoverable from the invoice signature; this decoder shows the key when the field is present.

Lightningdecoder.