Just pushed a new version of Arké to TestFlight. This one is about refinement: - More precise fee calculation, which is especially useful when trying to send the full savings (onchain) balance - Different intro video segments for signet and mainnet - A new cover video that is less 80's glam - Improved wallet creation performance and error handling - Unilateral exit progress display tweaks - Wallet import with file improvements Still ~150 to-dos on my list, but it is coming together.

Arké

Pay with bitcoin. In stylé.

Second has a new page about apps that implement Bark, their Ark implementation. Super nice to see Arké in there.

Second Docs

Built with Bark - Second Docs

Real apps shipping bitcoin payments on Ark, Lightning, and on-chain. Built by teams using the Bark SDK and Barkd.

And to keep going on and on about unilateral exits, Noah and bark-web support them also. As it should be.

Been seeing several conversations that it is not important for L2 wallets to implement unilateral exits. Good people, who else is going to do it? And who can actually do the unilateral exit for you when only your wallet has the data needed for it? The primary task of a wallet is to ensure your bitcoin are safe. Swapping to the 1000th stablecoin is way lower on the priority list.

OK, it appears that no Spark or Arkade Labs Ark wallet actually implements unilateral exits. Protocol-level capability or separate CLI tool is not usable for most and does not count. Pretty disappointing. So if the server goes away, your funds are gone. The feature to claim them is not implemented. And by the way Arké has a great unilateral exit flow. The Second crew provides a really good toolbox there. Let's maybe hold off with the stablecoins and yield and all that and make sure the basics are solid.

Has anyone tried a unilateral exit on Spark? How is it?

Bitcoin is "...a monetary technology. This is the accounting industry." https://stacker.news/items/1483355 I like it.

Looks like there are 294 different Stablecoins based on the US Dollar. The biggest one, Tether, exists on 126 different blockchain networks, 17 of which have 100M or more circulating USDT, and 60 have 1M or more. The second biggest, USDC, exists on 141 different blockchain networks, 18 of which have 100M or more circulating USDC, and 76 have 1M or more. When you want to pay with USDC in the Stripe Crypto Checkout Demo, you have to choose one of 400 different wallets. Decentralization at its finest. Just kidding, but how is this not super messy and a world of pain in regards to interoperability and payment UX?

DefiLlama

Stablecoin Market Cap Chart, Supply & Peg Data - DefiLlama

Track the total stablecoin market cap, circulating supply, prices, inflows, and peg stability across all stablecoins. Explore stablecoin market cha...

Stablecoin payments

Stablecoin payments let you accept stablecoins from customers around the world. Customers can pay with their preferred crypto wallet, token, and pa...

Got a Zombie score of 39%. What a great site. Something that's only possible on Nostr.

Plebs vs. Zombies

Plebs vs. Zombies | Nostr Follow Manager

Clean up your Nostr follow list by identifying and removing dormant zombie accounts. Hunt zombies, manage follows, and keep your network alive!

People are not friction. Well said.

daverupert.com

People are not friction

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency...

Quick demo, making 100 bitcoin (signet) transactions to see how Arké responds. Getting quite smooth overall.

Bit of a restyling of the Arké payments detail screen, along with some information architecture changes of the refresh indicator.

Can every one please stop implementing Spark? The privacy problems are real and annoying.

Cool to see the results of the Runway ad contest. AI video has made such huge leaps, and the participants really know how to get creative with it.

Runway's Big Ad Contest For Products that Don't Exist

A two week competition to make an award worthy spec ad with Runway for up to $100K in cash prizes.

Would be cool if Arké could make payments to local fiat destinations just by paying lightning invoices and other services like Tando handling everything in between. Some AI-brainstorming resulted in a simple protocol that could facilitate this. No clue if it's worthwhile, but was useful to explore:

GitHub

GitHub - GBKS/pave-protocol: Pave Protocol

Pave Protocol. Contribute to GBKS/pave-protocol development by creating an account on GitHub.

The new USDC site has some nice videos on how people use it. But I cannot get over the fact that all these chains are based on single-address re-use. If you organize your wedding in some other country and pay everyone with USDC, are you OK that they can see your full balance and all past and future transactions in that wallet? Or your employer or employees? Your grocery store? Or am I missing something?

USDC | The world’s largest regulated digital dollar

Send, spend, save, and trade with a fully reserved stablecoin. Trusted by millions, issued by Circle.

New Arké version is up on TestFlight, with a roughly estimated 1,000,000,000 improvements to the Send flow. Goal is that you can throw all your bitcoin/ark addresses, lightning invoices/offers/addresses, BIP-21s and BIP-353 in all kinds of combinations at it, and it will try to make sense of it all and present whatever comes out on the other end in a simple way. Quite intricate. It's a good iteration, with some more to come. Definitely feels like the most intricate part of the app.

"Beyond the GUI: It's Time for a Conversational User Interface" from 2013.

WIRED

Beyond the GUI: It's Time for a Conversational User Interface

The GUI has served us well for a long time, but it's beginning to fray around the edges. We’re now grappling with an unintended side effect of ub...

"Why conversational design is the future" from 2016. https://medium.com/intercom-inside/why-conversational-design-is-the-future-2c05f65aa68e Will AI make it happen this time?

Chuck Norris’s public key was his private key. Nobody dared to use it. RIP

Arké looks, feels, and works differently than other wallets. Wouldn't be much of a contribution to the ecosystem if it was like all the other ones. Some experiments will work and some will fail. But if we want more people to use this stuff, we need to try things.

Some interesting research by Anthropic on what people want from AI, and whether they are getting it.

What 81,000 people want from AI

Last December, tens of thousands of Claude users around the world had a conversation with our AI interviewer to share how they use AI, what they dr...