One year after its proposal, a new project revealed today is committed to making the Ark concept a reality. Ark Labs has announced that it is developing bitcoin's layer two network and hopes to capitalize on the growing demand for low-cost, scalable bitcoin payment solutions.
Speaking with bitcoin Magazine, Marco Argentieri, CEO of Ark Labs, shared his perspective on the evolution of the protocol since its initial launch.
“After months of prototyping and gathering proof 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.”
Using virtual accounts and transactions coordinated by a trustless server, Ark enables low-cost off-chain transfers between participants who choose to participate in the system.
Due to its simple server-client architecture, it manages to achieve this without the trade-offs usually associated with non-custodial systems. Argentieri believes the protocol is well positioned to support the growth of Lightning and other sidechain protocols like Liquid.
“We consider that all these solutions are complementary. “There is an obvious synergy between Ark and Lightning that we hope to leverage to create better, more reliable products for the entire ecosystem.”
The time is now
After the project caught the attention of the bitcoin community last year, momentum stalled once the protocol became caught up in talks over conventions and other upgrades. Argentieri believes there is an opportunity to move forward despite the ongoing debate over future improvements to the soft fork.
“We are working on two versions of Ark that can be deployed today, one on bitcoin and one on the Liquid Network. The agreements will improve the user experience, but we believe the technology already has many commercial use cases.”
Ark Labs is already collaborating with partners and expects applications or products to be released later in 2024.
Right now, Argentieri and his team of veteran bitcoin developers are focused on delivering a flexible implementation of the protocol to enable easy integration of Ark services into applications. To get there, they've open-sourced their code implementation and are inviting other interested parties to contribute to their efforts.
“We hope that other teams and implementations will begin to contribute to the Ark protocol so that we can generate the 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.”
While he acknowledges that the current infrastructure is still very immature, he is convinced that the pieces are there to execute the original vision.
“We are all in.”
