Grayscale Research Director: Four Reasons That Could Drive Bitcoin to New Highs in the First Half of 2026

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…

TLDR: Alpenglow reduces Solana finality from 12.8 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds, a 100-fold improvement. Votor enables one or two-round block finalization through

The post Why The Green Bay Packers Must Take The Cleveland Browns Seriously — As Hard As That Might Be appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Jordan Love and the Green Bay Packers are off to a 2-0 start. Getty Images The Green Bay Packers are, once again, one of the NFL’s better teams. The Cleveland Browns are, once again, one of the league’s doormats. It’s why unbeaten Green Bay (2-0) is a 8-point favorite at winless Cleveland (0-2) Sunday according to betmgm.com. The money line is also Green Bay -500. Most expect this to be a Packers’ rout, and it very well could be. But Green Bay knows taking anyone in this league for granted can prove costly. “I think if you look at their roster, the paper, who they have on that team, what they can do, they got a lot of talent and things can turn around quickly for them,” Packers safety Xavier McKinney said. “We just got to kind of keep that in mind and know we not just walking into something and they just going to lay down. That’s not what they going to do.” The Browns certainly haven’t laid down on defense. Far from. Cleveland is allowing an NFL-best 191.5 yards per game. The Browns gave up 141 yards to Cincinnati in Week 1, including just seven in the second half, but still lost, 17-16. Cleveland has given up an NFL-best 45.5 rushing yards per game and just 2.1 rushing yards per attempt. “The biggest thing is our defensive line is much, much improved over last year and I think we’ve got back to our personality,” defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz said recently. “When we play our best, our D-line leads us there as our engine.” The Browns rank third in the league in passing defense, allowing just 146.0 yards per game. Cleveland has also gone 30 straight games without allowing a 300-yard passer, the longest active streak in the NFL.…