The year after its proposalA brand new project, revealed today, is dedicated to bringing the Ark concept into reality. Ark Labs The company has revealed that it will be developing a Bitcoin layer-2 network in order to meet the demand for low-cost, scalable Bitcoin payment systems.
Marco Argentieri of Ark Labs shared with Bitcoin Magazine his thoughts on how the protocol has evolved since its original release.
“After months of prototyping and putting together proofs-of-concept, we believe Ark is ready to enter the next stage of its development and we are excited to share this opportunity with the industry”.
Ark is a low-cost system that allows off-chain transfers using accounts and transactions coordinated by a server without trust.
This is achieved by its straightforward server-client design, which avoids the typical trade-offs that come with other non-custodial system architectures. Argentieri thinks the protocol can support Lightning as well other sidechain protocols, like Liquid.
“We look at all of those solutions as complementary. There is an obvious synergy between Ark and Lightning which we hope to leverage to build better, more reliable, products for the entire ecosystem”.
It’s Time to Act
After the project caught the attention of Bitcoin’s community in 2013, momentum stopped when the protocol became entangled with the discussions around covenants, upgrades and other improvements. Argentieri says there’s still a chance to progress, despite ongoing discussion on the future of soft forks.
“We are working on two versions of Ark that can be implemented today, one on Bitcoin and the other on the Liquid Network. Covenants will improve the user experience but we think the technology already has many commercial use cases”.
Ark Labs already has partners in place and anticipates launching applications or other products by the end of 2024.
Argentieri, along with his veteran Bitcoin team are currently focused on developing a flexible implementation to enable easy integration of Ark Services into applications. They have opened-sourced their code to get there. implementation Other stakeholders are invited to participate in their efforts.
“We’re hoping other teams and implementations start contributing to the Ark protocol so that we can come up with best standards and practices. Our goal is to give every wallet access to an Ark server in the same way they can use Lightning today”.
He is aware that current infrastructures are still very young, but he believes that all the pieces exist to implement the original vision.
“We’re all in”.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com