1 year later suggestionThe new projects announced today include: Arc Concept In reality. Arc Lab The company is developing a Bitcoin Layer 2 network and hopes to capitalize on the growing demand for scalable, low-cost Bitcoin payment solutions.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Ark Labs CEO Marco Argentieri shared his views on the evolution of the protocol since its initial release.
“After months of prototyping and proof-of-concept work, we believe Ark is ready to move forward to the next stage of development and are excited to share this opportunity with the industry.”
Ark enables low-cost off-chain transfers between participants in the system using accounts and virtual transactions coordinated by untrusted servers.
Its simple server-client architecture enables it to do this without the trade-offs typically associated with non-custodial systems, and Argentieri believes the protocol is well-positioned to support the growth of other sidechain protocols such as Lightning and Liquid.
“We see all these solutions as complementary. There are clear synergies between Ark and Lightning that we want to leverage to build better, more reliable products for the entire ecosystem.”
The time is now
The project gained traction in the Bitcoin community last year, but momentum stalled as the protocol became embroiled in debate over contracts and other upgrades. Despite ongoing discussions over upcoming soft fork improvements, Argentieri believes there is an opportunity to move forward.
“We are currently working on two versions of Ark that can be implemented on the Bitcoin and Liquid networks. Covenant will improve the user experience, but we believe there are already many commercial use cases for the technology.”
Ark Labs is already working with partners, with applications and products expected to be released in the second half of 2024.
Now, Argentieri and his team of veteran Bitcoin developers are focused on providing a flexible implementation of the protocol so that Ark’s services can be easily integrated into applications. To that end, they have open-sourced it. implementation And we invite other stakeholders to join us in that effort.
“We hope that other teams and implementations will start contributing to the Ark protocol so that we can establish best standards and practices. Our goal is for all wallets to be able to access Ark servers in the same way they can today with Lightning.”
While he acknowledges that the current infrastructure is still very immature, he believes the pieces are in place to execute his original vision.
“We’re all in.”
