US Probes Bitmain for National Security Concerns

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…

Bitcoin’s US community reacted sharply on Thursday when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made an unannounced visit to Pubkey DC, a new Bitcoin-themed bar in Washington, D.C. His appearance at the opening spread quickly across X. Many industry participants viewed the visit as a visible sign of Bitcoin’s growing political and cultural presence in the United […]

Ethereum price predictions are turning heads, with analysts suggesting ETH could climb to $10,000 by 2026 as institutional demand and network upgrades drive growth. While Ethereum remains a blue-chip asset, investors looking for sharper multiples are eyeing Layer Brett (LBRETT). Currently in presale at just $0.0058, the Ethereum Layer 2 meme coin is drawing huge [...] The post Ethereum Price Prediction: ETH Targets $10,000 In 2026 But Layer Brett Could Reach $1 From $0.0058 appeared first on Blockonomi.