Expert Economist Shares the Real Reason Bitcoin Lags Behind Gold

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 Shanghai residents flock to sell gold as its price hit record highs appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Gold surged over the $5,500-per-ounce milestone

The post Polygon Tops RWA Rankings With $1.1B in Tokenized Assets appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Key Notes A new report from Dune and RWA.xyz highlights Polygon’s role in the growing RWA sector. Polygon PoS currently holds $1.13 billion in RWA Total Value Locked (TVL) across 269 assets. The network holds a 62% market share of tokenized global bonds, driven by European money market funds. The Polygon POL $0.25 24h volatility: 1.4% Market cap: $2.64 B Vol. 24h: $106.17 M network is securing a significant position in the rapidly growing tokenization space, now holding over $1.13 billion in total value locked (TVL) from Real World Assets (RWAs). This development comes as the network continues to evolve, recently deploying its major “Rio” upgrade on the Amoy testnet to enhance future scaling capabilities. This information comes from a new joint report on the state of the RWA market published on Sept. 17 by blockchain analytics firm Dune and data platform RWA.xyz. The focus on RWAs is intensifying across the industry, coinciding with events like the ongoing Real-World Asset Summit in New York. Sandeep Nailwal, CEO of the Polygon Foundation, highlighted the findings via a post on X, noting that the TVL is spread across 269 assets and 2,900 holders on the Polygon PoS chain. The Dune and https://t.co/W6WSFlHoQF report on RWA is out and it shows that RWA is happening on Polygon. Here are a few highlights: – Leading in Global Bonds: Polygon holds 62% share of tokenized global bonds (driven by Spiko’s euro MMF and Cashlink euro issues) – Spiko U.S.… — Sandeep | CEO, Polygon Foundation (※,※) (@sandeepnailwal) September 17, 2025 Key Trends From the 2025 RWA Report The joint publication, titled “RWA REPORT 2025,” offers a comprehensive look into the tokenized asset landscape, which it states has grown 224% since the start of 2024. The report identifies several key trends driving this expansion. According to…