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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…

The post Let insiders trade – Blockworks appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe ​​“The most valuable commodity I know of is information.” — Gordon Gekko, Wall Street Ten months ago, FBI agents raided Shayne Coplan’s Manhattan apartment, ostensibly in search of evidence that the prediction market he founded, Polymarket, had illegally allowed US residents to place bets on the US election. Two weeks ago, the CFTC gave Polymarket the green light to allow those very same US residents to place bets on whatever they like. This is quite the turn of events — and it’s not just about elections or politics. With its US government seal of approval in hand, Polymarket is reportedly raising capital at a valuation of $9 billion — a reflection of the growing belief that prediction markets will be used for much more than betting on elections once every four years. Instead, proponents say prediction markets can provide a real service to the world by providing it with better information about nearly everything. I think they might, too — but only if insiders are free to participate. Yesterday, for example, Polymarket announced new betting markets on company earnings reports, with a promise that it would improve the information that investors have to work with.  Instead of waiting three months to find out how a company is faring, investors could simply watch the odds on Polymarket.  If the probability of an earnings beat is rising, for example, investors would know at a glance that things are going well. But that will only happen if enough of the people betting actually know how things are going. Relying on the wisdom of crowds to magically discern how a business is doing won’t add much incremental knowledge to the world; everyone’s guesses are unlikely to average out to the truth. If…

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