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👇 https://arkdev.info/blog/bitcoin-virtual-channels/ 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.