Year-end focus on Fed policy and sector rotation; US stocks surge to record highs.

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…

Daily market key data review and trend analysis, produced by PANews.

The post Fed Decides On Interest Rates Today—Here’s What To Watch For appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Topline The Federal Reserve on Wednesday will conclude a two-day policymaking meeting and release a decision on whether to lower interest rates—following months of pressure and criticism from President Donald Trump—and potentially signal whether additional cuts are on the way. President Donald Trump has urged the central bank to “CUT INTEREST RATES, NOW, AND BIGGER” than they might plan to. Getty Images Key Facts The central bank is poised to cut interest rates by at least a quarter-point, down from the 4.25% to 4.5% range where they have been held since December to between 4% and 4.25%, as Wall Street has placed 100% odds of a rate cut, according to CME’s FedWatch, with higher odds (94%) on a quarter-point cut than a half-point (6%) reduction. Fed governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, both Trump appointees, voted in July for a quarter-point reduction to rates, and they may dissent again in favor of a large cut alongside Stephen Miran, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers’ chair, who was sworn in at the meeting’s start on Tuesday. It’s unclear whether other policymakers, including Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid and St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem, will favor larger cuts or opt for no reduction. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in his Jackson Hole, Wyoming, address last month the central bank would likely consider a looser monetary policy, noting the “shifting balance of risks” on the U.S. economy “may warrant adjusting our policy stance.” David Mericle, an economist for Goldman Sachs, wrote in a note the “key question” for the Fed’s meeting is whether policymakers signal “this is likely the first in a series of consecutive cuts” as the central bank is anticipated to “acknowledge the softening in the labor market,” though they may not “nod to an October cut.” Mericle said he…