Yesterday I spent the day at the Arkade Activation Day in the beautiful city of Lugano, one of the most important Bitcoin hubs in Europe, where ArkLabs CEO Marco Argentieri officially launched ArkadeOS on Mainnet. The event featured several announcements from companies integrating Arkade inside their products, such as Boltz with their Ark swaps and LendaSat with non-custodial, Bitcoin-backed loans, panels with some of the most important names in the space, and discussions about Bitcoin capital markets. We all know the limitations of the modern financial system. It is a trust-based environment, centralized with slow settlement and limited innovation. Bitcoin is creating a new paradigm, but the base-layer alone cannot provide the infrastructure for the system of tomorrow. The financial stack of tomorrow will have to achieve instant finality, it must be permissionless and self-custodial, programmable by design, and, of course, Bitcoin-native. This is what ArkLabs is trying to build. Arkade, ArkLabs’ implementation of Ark, will not just be a protocol for payments, but it aims to be the foundation of the financial system of the future, with a whole new ecosystem of applications built on top of it. Ark is a programmable execution layer for Bitcoin, which allow off-chain virtual execution. Since it is based on the same UTXO concept, namely Virtual UTXOs (VTXOs), everything that can be done on Bitcoin can be done on Ark, but with the advantage to decouple from space and time constraints of the base layer. According to Marco Argentieri, these characteristics make it the best possible layer for building the financial infrastructure of tomorrow. However, he was not the only Ark bull in the room. Francis Pouliot, from Bull Bitcoin, Roy Sheinfeld, from Breeze, and Gareth Gobler, from LayerZ Wallet, all agreed that Ark is the best solution for improving the user experience of Bitcoin payments without sacrificing self-custody. Its most important characteristic is unilateral exit, which makes it a better choice with respect to other solutions, such as Liquid. Bitcoin is the best possible saving technology, but there is the need for more financial services that could leverage those savings. There are Trillions in productive Bitcoin capital ready to be deployed, but the financial infrastructure is not ready. There is the need for more financial apps for different use cases, such as lending and trading. Companies such as Lendasat and Hodl Hodl are working actively to integrate Arkade in their applications. To prepare for this, ArkLabs’ team is also working on extending virtualization to other asset types, allowing to create Arkade Assets. This would allow to bring Stablecoins to Bitcoin and use them in these financial apps. Arkade comes with 3 different SDKs, for Rust ,Go and TypeScript for building apps, an enterprise-level wallet, Fulmine, and a mobile wallet, provided as a Progressive Web App (PWA). Integration with BTCPayServer, Lendasat and Boltz are already available. Moreover, a MetaMask snap is available to bring Bitcoin, Lightning and Arkade to the broader crypto ecosystem. After the proof of concept at BHB in August, Arkade is now launching on mainnet. ArkLab’s CEO demoed a payment from their brand new PWA wallet to Coinos, which was confirmed in a blink of an eye. - @tuma - Rust SDK: https://github.com/arkade-os/rust-sdk Go SDK: https://github.com/arkade-os/go-sdk TypeScript SDk: https://github.com/arkade-os/ts-sdk Arkade mobile wallet: https://arkade.money/ Boltz integration: https://ark.boltz.exchange/ Metamask snap: https://github.com/arkade-os/snap