A year after it was proposed, a new project was unveiled today committed to turning the ship concept into reality. Ark Labs The Bitcoin company announced that it is developing a layer 2 Bitcoin network and hopes to capitalize on the growing demand for scalable and low-cost Bitcoin payment solutions.
Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, Marco Argenteri, CEO of Ark Labs, shared his perspective on the protocol’s evolution since its initial release.
“After months of prototyping and assembling proofs of concept, we believe Ark is ready to enter the next phase of its development and we are excited to share this opportunity with industry.”
Using virtual accounts and transactions that are coordinated by an untrusted server, Ark enables low-cost off-chain transfers between participants who have chosen the system.
Due to its simple client-server architecture, it manages to achieve this without the trade-offs typically 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 view all of these solutions as complementary. There is a clear synergy between Ark and Lightning that we hope to leverage to build better, more reliable products for the entire ecosystem.”
the time now
After the project captured the attention of the Bitcoin community last year, momentum stalled once the protocol engaged in talks about charters and other upgrades. Argentieri believes there is an opportunity to move forward despite the controversy surrounding future soft fork improvements.
“We are working on two versions of Ark that can be implemented today, one on Bitcoin and the other on Liquid Network. Covenants will improve the user experience but we believe the technology already has many commercial use cases.”
Ark Labs is already working with partners and expects to launch applications or products later in 2024.
Currently, Argentieri and his team of veteran Bitcoin developers are focused on providing a flexible implementation of the protocol to allow for easy integration of Ark services into applications. To get there, they opened their sources application They invite other stakeholders to contribute to their efforts.
“We hope that other teams and applications will start contributing to the Ark Protocol so we can come up with best standards and practices. Our goal is to give every wallet access to the Ark server in the same way they can use Lightning today.
While he realizes that the current infrastructure is still very immature, he is convinced that the pieces are in place to implement the original vision.
“We're all in.”