New Ark Simple explainer & FAQ https://docs.arklabs.xyz/ Bitcoin's blockchain offers strong security guarantees at the tradeoff of limited transaction throughput, high fees, and settlement delays, restricting its practical use for various applications requiring greater scalability, lower costs, or faster settlement. Ark addresses these limitations primarily through a novel batching technique, aggregating numerous individual Bitcoin transactions into a single onchain Bitcoin commitment—called a Batch Output. This significantly reduces transaction costs per user and greatly enhances scalability. The protocol mirrors Bitcoin’s familiar UTXO structure using Virtual Transaction Outputs (VTXOs). These offchain abstractions preserve a familiar output ownership model while embedding many claims into a single Batch Output. VTXOs ensure that users retain unilateral control over their funds and enable efficient offchain coordination before final settlement on Bitcoin. Link for details! 👾

Last weekend at @blockspacepod’s OP_NEXT, we demoed Arkade — a prototype wallet built on the Ark protocol, live on Bitcoin mainnet. While just a proof-of-concept, it pointed to something bigger: A new class of Bitcoin applications is possible today, without consensus changes. Much of OP_NEXT focused on what soft forks might unlock. That’s important work — and we support it. But our focus has been different: Delivering utility with the Bitcoin we already have. The Arkade Wallet isn’t just a teaser. It’s a working step toward reframing what’s possible on Bitcoin — here and now. Many so-called L2s are still theoretical. Ark is real. It’s on mainnet. And it’s moving. Ark isn’t a Lightning replacement. It opens up an entirely different design space: Modular apps, flexible coordination, programmable flows. Arkade is more than a wallet — it’s the first look at a Bitcoin-native platform. We’re building toward a future where Bitcoin isn’t just a store of value. It’s the foundation for programmable money and sovereign capital markets. The tools are open. Let’s build. 🔗 github.com/ArkLabsHQ/wallet-sdk 👾

Ark will 10x the Lightning self custodial user experience. The days of channels and liquidity management are behind us. Just swap. (no soft fork needed) 👾

Progress report on our core Ark implementation! With major releases and announcements on the horizon, this update enhances performance & reliability to strengthen our foundation. 👉 Optimized VTXO tree signing 👉 Connector trees 👉 SDK API updates https://arkdev.info/blog/ark-release-v0.5/

We built a Coinflip PoC using multiparty contracts on Ark! Bonus points: it uses Nostr on the backend. Ark's client-server architecture, built around presigned transactions, provides an interesting framework for coordinating complex multi-party interactions. A key insight from our Coinflip implementation: Ark operators validate spending conditions off-chain, such that in the optimistic case, complex validation logic doesn't hit the blockchain at all. Once the game concludes, players settle their balance without intermediary trust. It's available here: Coinflip is available here:

CoinFlip

Bitcoin-powered coin flipping game

Check it out! 👾

Ark is NOT competing with Lightning. You do NOT have to try to pull it down with your grade school understanding of it just because you feel insecure about the piss poor state of the solutions you are working on. There is a VERY distasteful “not invented here” attitude from some Lightning developers circles who seem more than happy to point out Ark faults. Clean your own room first.

Ark transactions are no different than Bitcoin transactions. Once broadcasted they remain unconfirmed until at minimum the next Bitcoin block. Unlike Bitcoin, Ark lets users chain unconfirmed transactions and choose when to settle them in a future block, into an Ark batch.

Batched bitcoin transactions. No expensive ZK professor tech scripts. No gated liquidity, no fragmented network effect. Just presigned transactions, collateralized. Soon.

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 👾

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.