3-deposit.md

description
Having an empty open channel won't in itself let you make payments. You also need to make sure that you have tokens deposited at your end of the channel.

Deposit Tokens

If you opened a channel by yourself you most likely already deposited tokens when sending the request. However, in case someone opened a channel with you, you will not have any tokens at your end of the channel.

You need to make a deposit whenever you want to:

• Add tokens to an empty channel
• Top up the amount of tokens in a channel

Deposit into a channel

The channel endpoint together with a PATCH request is used for depositing tokens into a channel. When making the call you need to include:

1. The token address as a path parameter.
2. The address of the partner node as a path parameter.
3. The amount of tokens you want to deposit in the channel as a body parameter.

curl -i -X PATCH \
http://localhost:5001/api/v1/channels/0x9aBa529db3FF2D8409A1da4C9eB148879b046700/0x61C808D82A3Ac53231750daDc13c777b59310bD9 \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{"total_deposit": "7331"}'

This will give you the same response object as when opening a channel or querying the state of a channel.

Now, once there are tokens at your end of the channel, let's start making payments.

{% page-ref page="3-make-a-payment.md" %}