A newly minted insider trader suffered a $1.3 million loss from closing out his BTC positions, while his 40,000 ETH holdings were showing a floating loss of $2.05 million.

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 Ethereum’s peer-to-peer backbone faces open-source funding gap appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Shipyard, a key maintainer of libp2p — the peer-to-peer networking stack underpinning Ethereum and dozens of other networks — will cease support for its Go and JavaScript implementations by Sept. 30, citing resource constraints.  In a blog post, the team confirmed it is “working to transition stewardship to the community.” Libp2p is the backbone of Ethereum’s peer-to-peer networking layer, providing the protocol suite that consensus clients use to discover peers, exchange messages, and propagate blocks and attestations across the network. Ethereum clients rely on libp2p’s Gossipsub pub/sub protocol to rapidly broadcast new blocks and validator votes, a process that must complete within strict slot deadlines to keep the chain running smoothly. The status quo is “against good engineering practice,” according to MIT professor and Optimum co-founder Muriel Médard, who has developed a drop-in, API-compatible replacement for Gossipsub, called OptimumP2P (mumP2P). “The thing is, if you hardwire something that does not need to be hardwired, you create fragility and dependence,” Médard told Blockworks. Tea Protocol presents one possible answer to funding conundrums such as this, within the open-source software community. Tea is a blockchain-based system that maps open-source dependencies, ranks projects by criticality, and routes token rewards and security bounties to maintainers to ensure long-term, sustainable support, per Tea co-founder Max Howell, creator of Homebrew. While the ecosystems that rely on libp2p are mobilizing around a transition for the software, in the short term there’s a risk of a slowdown in triaging bugs or security issues, amid the loss of Shipyard’s institutional knowledge. “The incentives aren’t really there for open source maintainers to care enough about security,” Howell told Blockworks, noting that, today, open-source software is more than “a public good,” and rather “fundamental infrastructure.” Timothy Lewis, Tea’s co-founder, said libp2p “sits in what we consider the protocol ranking graph —…

The post It’s Not A Bubble, Because AI Is Already Running The Markets appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Opinion by: Saad Naja, Founder and CEO at PiP World While the world debates whether AI is the next dot-com bubble, chasing valuations rather than implications, they’re missing the underlying innovation story. The same AI infrastructure fueling trillion-dollar bets is already rewriting how money moves. AI is no longer an investment theme. It’s the market itself.  What few noticed is that the same AI infrastructure driving the headlines is already reshaping the markets from within. The invisible battle happening behind the candlesticks isn’t bulls and bears anymore; it’s between self-learning AIs that never sleep.  Markets aren’t just humans using algorithms. They’re autonomous swarms fighting for milliseconds. Agents watch every market 24/7, spotting risks, debating strategies and executing without hesitation.  The next traders aren’t humans Recent breakthroughs in AI and blockchain acceptance have created the perfect conditions for agentic markets to flourish. AI provides cognition; meanwhile, blockchain supplies trust, verification and payment rails. This offers the medium for AI agents to transact, prove, and exchange value freely.  AI has crossed the chasm from stock picker to near-autonomous day trader. It learns and acts faster than any human. It spots what humans miss, predicts the move before it happens and never second-guesses itself. It’s the ultimate insider, without inflaming the SEC. It’s early days for agentic AI in trading, but make no mistake — it’s here and already moving the markets while most traders sleep. Agentic trading even in freefall During the biggest crypto flash crash on Oct. 10, while the rest of the crypto market was in freefall, AI agents did the opposite. They stayed calm, shorted the chaos, and ended the week up 40%. They gave us a glimpse into the future of markets. One where the AI agents don’t just follow code, they respond like real traders.  Algorithmic Trading…