Alex B. from Bitcoin Magazine sat in with Michael Boltz from Ark Labs and Tiero, from Boltz to talk about the latest advancements in Bitcoin technology, especially the Lightning Network, Liquid and new technologies such as Ark.
Lightning’s Journey and Challenges
Michael Shared Insights on Challenges Faced, Especially in High-Fee Environments. “The biggest blind spot that was glaringly obvious recently was like in a high fee environment, Lightning tends to hurt a lot,” He said. He went on to elaborate about the problems posed with fee spikes, and how better solutions and preparation are needed.
Tiero’s challenge was to highlight the challenges Lightning infrastructure presents. He emphasized that innovative Lightning designs are needed to link various layers including Fedimint Liquid and Ark to enhance user experience. “Lightning will always be the way to connect all these new ideas,” Tiero said.
Liquid’s role is contested
Michael and Tiero agreed that Liquid, although it has been adopted relatively slowly compared with other technologies in the past few years, is still a solid and reliable platform. “Liquid has been around the block. It’s known and it survived. It’s still around today,” Michael pointed out that the platform has proven to be resilient and reliable over the years. Developers who want to experiment and build new solutions need this stability.
Tiero of Ark Labs discussed the benefits sidechains and Liquid have, including their ability reduce congestion on Bitcoin’s main chain. “Having a side chain with clear trade-offs can alleviate pressure on the main chain,” In his words, Liquid’s architectural design offers distinct benefits including reduced transaction fees and quicker processing times. It can also be beneficial for high-fee environments where shifting operations away from the main network can lead to significant savings.
Michael spoke also about the new proposals in blockchain, saying that Liquid’s proven track record can offer a degree of predictability and trust that may be lacking with newer solutions. “In the grand scheme of things of the new proposals coming up, I think Liquid is here to stay for at least quite a while.”
Emerging standards & interoperability
Michael Boltz from Boltz discussed the fragmentation of the ecosystem and the role that his company can play to provide liquidity for different services. It is important to maintain a connected and fluid ecosystem that can facilitate the swapping of Bitcoin layers such as Lightning and Liquid. Boltz offers these services to bridge gaps between various platforms and make it easier for the users of Boltz to transfer assets.
Michael emphasized the need to maximize competition between service providers in order for users to receive the most competitive market prices. “In the end, an open spec would make sense, but we are so early in this process,” He emphasized the need for experimentation prior to standardization. This phase of experimentation allows the identification of the best practices that can inform the development and standardization of protocols.
Ark Labs’ Tiero agreed with Michael’s comments, saying the diverse needs of users make it difficult at this point to set universal standards. “Every business has its own user and sensibility to their user.” He said that efforts to standardize would be justified if there was a more diverse and larger ecosystem, but businesses must have the freedom to respond to specific customer needs.
They both agreed that it is important to encourage companies to innovate and experiment freely. “We can move so much faster if we can just try out things ourselves and see where it goes,” Michael added. Michael said.
ARK: Innovations in the ARK
Ark Labs’ Tiero gives us a glimpse of their newest project Ark. “ARK is still in a post-idea stage.” It is important to him that the protocol integrates with Lightning and other existing technologies, so that users can benefit from it.
“We managed to show that it is doable, is working. And the thing I think the next step will really be trying to understand what are the real use cases for which demand is huge,” Tiero noted. By focusing exclusively on the practical needs of users and addressing their real applications, ARK aims at creating a user-friendly, robust protocol to address current ecosystem limitations.
ARK’s development strategy is based on experimentation. Tiero stressed the importance of testing on flexible environments such as Liquid, before finalizing specifications. “Let’s just go where it’s super flexible and Liquid has introspectional code at the maximum level so you can really do recursive covenants,” He explained. The team is able to fully explore the protocol’s potential and adjust it based upon feedback from real world applications.
Michael explains the uncertain future of ARK and its liquidity needs. “It’s also like unknown unknowns again. In theory, it’s interesting for service providers who have liquidity anyways,” He stressed the importance of further exploration.
Bitcoin’s Future: Optimistic about the Future
Both Tiero and Michael concluded the discussion with a sense of optimism regarding the future of Bitcoin layer technology and covenant. Tiero was particularly optimistic about covenant technology and its potential to enhance protocols such as ARK or Lightning. “I’m super, super bullish after these two days because for the first time all the people working with Covenant in production or in general, they’re really, really very knowledgeable about the topic.” He praised the chance to have experts discuss and refine ideas in an environment that fosters collaboration, which is conducive to innovative breakthroughs.
The group also applauded specific proposals such as Rusty Russell’s Restoration Project, which is aimed at improving Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities. “Rusty’s model gives us actually something to talk about, a frame of reference for what these covenants mean from a computational perspective and like you can actually like I said restore Bitcoin script to its former glory in a safe and sensible manner,” Michael.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com