Pluggable Channel Factories

Protocol Design
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I have been wondering about channel factories and how to extend the bolts to support them quite a bit. For example I think besides your SuperScalar proposal VTXOs in Ark are a natural candidate to be funding TX for channels.

While many LSPs consider channel factories a proper use for the last mile problem and are willing to consider unannounced channels I am wondering about extensions to BOLT7 where it states for example:

A node:

  • SHOULD monitor the funding transactions in the blockchain, to identify channels that are being closed.
  • if the funding output of a channel is spent and received 12 block confirmations:
  • SHOULD be removed from the local network view AND be considered closed.

Channels within a factory cannot be monitored on the blockchain. Similarly the announcement of such channels will be tricky as bolt7 currently states:

  • MUST set bitcoin_key_1 and bitcoin_key_2 to node_id_1 and node_id_2’s respective funding_pubkeys.

However as laid out in my research I believe routing nodes will eventually need channel factories for their liquidity management to fulfill and facilitate payment requests. Thus those channels may need to be announced and we should wonder how we can extend gossip to do so. I understand that there are ideas in future gossip to remove the tight coupling and spam prevention.

In any case I believe a protocol for pluggable channel factories should give providers of channel factories an API to sign of that they created a channel and a method for to nodes to monitor if the channel was closed.

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