How the Greater Bay Area Is Reshaping Cross-Border B2B Payments

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…

PANews reported on September 18th, according to the Securities Times, that at 2:00 AM Beijing time on September 18th, the Federal Reserve announced a 25 basis point interest rate cut, lowering the federal funds rate from 4.25%-4.50% to 4.00%-4.25%, in line with market expectations. The Fed's interest rate announcement triggered a sharp market reaction, with the three major US stock indices rising briefly before quickly plunging. The US dollar index plummeted, briefly hitting a new low since 2025, before rebounding sharply, turning a decline into an upward trend. The sharp market volatility was closely tied to the subsequent monetary policy press conference held by Federal Reserve Chairman Powell. He stated that the 50 basis point rate cut lacked broad support and that there was no need for a swift adjustment. Today's move could be viewed as a risk-management cut, suggesting the Fed will not enter a sustained cycle of rate cuts. Powell reiterated the Fed's unwavering commitment to maintaining its independence. Market participants are currently unaware of the risks to the Fed's independence. The latest published interest rate dot plot shows that the median expectation of Fed officials is to cut interest rates twice more this year (by 25 basis points each), one more than predicted in June this year. At the same time, Fed officials expect that after three rate cuts this year, there will be another 25 basis point cut in 2026 and 2027.

The post Solana Sees $10M Capital Rotation, Eyes $100 Breakout appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Capital rotation into Solana accelerated this week as traders