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…

Na een relatief rustige dag op de cryptomarkt zien we lichte verschuivingen in de koersen, terwijl het algemene marktsentiment nog steeds aan de voorzichtige kant

The post Today’s Wordle #1552 Hints And Answer For Thursday, September 18th appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. How to solve today’s Wordle. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images I posted the Wordle Wednesday riddle yesterday, but somehow had deleted it when the post went live, so the riddle itself went up late. If you missed it, my apologies. In any case, the solution is below, but first, here was the (late) riddle: “I’m the beginning of the end and the end of time and space. I am in everything and surround every place. What am I?” The answer: The letter “E”. It’s the beginning of End and the end of timE and spacE. It’s in evErything and surrounds Every placE. Kind of clever. It would be much harder if you heard the riddle spoken. Looking for Tuesday’s Wordle? Check out our guide right here. How To Play Wordle Wordle is a daily word puzzle game where your goal is to guess a hidden five-letter word in six tries or fewer. After each guess, the game gives feedback to help you get closer to the answer: Green: The letter is in the word and in the correct spot. Yellow: The letter is in the word, but in the wrong spot. Gray: The letter is not in the word at all. Use these clues to narrow down your guesses. Every day brings a new word, and everyone around the world is trying to solve the same puzzle. Some Wordlers also play Competitive Wordle against friends, family, the Wordle Bot or even against me, your humble narrator. See rules for Competitive Wordle toward the end of this post. Today’s Wordle Hints And Answer Wordle Bot’s Starting Word: SLATE My Starting Word Today: TRAIL (189 words remaining) The Hint: This Wordle cuts to the bone. The Clue: This Wordle starts with a silent letter. Okay, spoilers below! The answer is coming! .…