Ark is sufficient as a scaling solution for the foreseeable future. We have a lot to learn from the implications it will have on self custodial applications and the entire Lightning ecosystem. If you're interested in additional opcodes to Bitcoin for security concerns then that's a different conversation but we have plenty of time to put together a compelling vision that can put consensus in motion.

Once our industry wakes up to the fact that Ark is not a payment pool, we'll be in a much better position to evaluate future scaling conversations. Taproot transaction batching changes everything. All priors need to be reevaluated. Clean slate.

Let's play some games 👾

Since somebody asked… We currently use Nostr in our PoC Ark wallet to enable users to recover expired VTXO funds.

By the way this is an interesting option for Nostr apps to integrate bitcoin payments/wallet functionality. Different risk profile than ecash, less private out the box. View quoted note →

Hey Nostr, been a while heh. we’ll try to fix that… eventually. Meanwhile, we just released our Ark wallet SDK! It’s still at a very early stage but you can now interact with an Ark server, on signet. Details 👇

Blog - Ark Labs

Introducing the Ark Wallet SDK

The Ark Wallet SDK, a TypeScript-powered toolkit for building Bitcoin wallets with both on-chain and off-chain transaction support.

If you truly want to accelerate covenant traction then the single best thing you can probably do is to contribute to development, tooling, and adoption of Ark. It's the one thing every single one of you have control over.

Ark's superpower lies in its ability to leverage native Bitcoin script 🦸🏻‍♂️ Scaling UTXO-based contracts has the potential to enable a new generation of financial applications. Today, we're happy to share our work on Virtual Channels, bringing instant settlement to Ark . Few might remember that payment channels predate the Lightning Network ⚡️ Early implementations, like the unidirectional channels in bitcoinj, never caught on for a variety of reasons One obvious downside comes from the high on-chain costs associated with channel setups. Ark allows us to revisit this concept, unburdened by Bitcoin's limited block space. Cost-effective deployment of payment channels becomes possible! For users, Virtual Channels offer notable advantages over Lightning: No backups ✅ No liveness requirements ✅ No routing ✅ Thanks to Tapscript, we can extend bare VTXO script beyond a single signer By defining additional spending paths, we can encapsulate multi-party contracts within VTXOs, enabling the creation of Virtual Channels Details and code snippets below👇

Blog - Ark Labs

Bitcoin Virtual Channels: Bringing Instant Settlement To Ark

Leveraging Ark’s VTXO paradigm, Virtual Channels enable efficient, low-cost Bitcoin payment channels by lifting smart contracts off-chain One of...

Virtual Channels are just the beginning! By extending Bitcoin's script capabilities through Ark, we’re opening the door to a broader financial infrastructure secured by Bitcoin's consensus rules.

Ark offers a simple, secure way to optimize onchain costs for pretty much every Bitcoin use cases. More complex and fancy ways to create channel factories or coinpools might exist but no one is building them nor are they likely too because the complexity invites inertia always. The longer you look at Ark the more you realize that simple approaches win and we can simply iterate off this as we find product market fit. Anyone that is interested to learn more or contribute please reach out I’m happy to take a minute to help people familiarize themselves with the protocol.

I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it to Berlin but I promise I’ll make it up to the ecash squad very soon.

We just announced yesterday in Amsterdam that @`Boltz - Non-Custodial Bitcoin Bridge` swaps are coming to Ark, day 1! Thanks to native support for Bitcoin script operations, Ark allows servers to virtualize many of the same contracts used by existing Bitcoin products and services. One we're excited about are Virtual HTLCs (vHTLCs). Combined with off-chain execution, we think they open the door to many new, and old, use cases that weren't possible before, or could not scale. Those properties can extend to other script extensions of Bitcoin and potentially scale smart contract settlements! Using virtual swaps, we can close Lightning's "liquidity loop" by providing participants with an interface to batch their channel management operations off-chain. Many infrastructure providers will find interesting ways to leverage the efficiency of Ark swaps and we encourage anyone interested to reach out @Ark Labs