Ethereum-Powered ZKsync Charts Path to Real-World Business Solutions

The post The Channel Factories We’ve Been Waiting For appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Visions of future technology are often prescient about the broad strokes while flubbing the details. The tablets in “2001: A Space Odyssey” do indeed look like iPads, but you never see the astronauts paying for subscriptions or wasting hours on Candy Crush.  Channel factories are one vision that arose early in the history of the Lightning Network to address some challenges that Lightning has faced from the beginning. Despite having grown to become Bitcoin’s most successful layer-2 scaling solution, with instant and low-fee payments, Lightning’s scale is limited by its reliance on payment channels. Although Lightning shifts most transactions off-chain, each payment channel still requires an on-chain transaction to open and (usually) another to close. As adoption grows, pressure on the blockchain grows with it. The need for a more scalable approach to managing channels is clear. Channel factories were supposed to meet this need, but where are they? In 2025, subnetworks are emerging that revive the impetus of channel factories with some new details that vastly increase their potential. They are natively interoperable with Lightning and achieve greater scale by allowing a group of participants to open a shared multisig UTXO and create multiple bilateral channels, which reduces the number of on-chain transactions and improves capital efficiency. Achieving greater scale by reducing complexity, Ark and Spark perform the same function as traditional channel factories with new designs and additional capabilities based on shared UTXOs.  Channel Factories 101 Channel factories have been around since the inception of Lightning. A factory is a multiparty contract where multiple users (not just two, as in a Dryja-Poon channel) cooperatively lock funds in a single multisig UTXO. They can open, close and update channels off-chain without updating the blockchain for each operation. Only when participants leave or the factory dissolves is an on-chain transaction…

Will the Fed’s first rate cut of 2025 fuel another leg higher for Bitcoin and equities, or does September’s history point to caution? First rate cut of 2025 set against a fragile backdrop The Federal Reserve is widely expected to…

Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin, has unveiled new goals for the Ethereum blockchain today at the Japan Developer Conference. The plan lays out short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals touching on L2 interoperability and faster responsiveness among others. In terms of technology, he said again that he is sure that Layer 2 options are the best way […]