Popular crypto project ARK has continued their increased activity as of late as they went live with their ARK Pay feature.
ARK Pay is a simple open source library that provides merchants with the ability to integrate ARK as a payment option in their online stores. It is also one of the key components of ARK’s toolkit that is meant to provide developers with a plug-and-play module to allow easy implementation of ARK as a payment method.
This JavaScript supporting plugin leverages any ARK powered blockchain and is relatively simple to set up, claims ARK in their official announcement. You can check out the announcement here to see further instructions for shops, end users, as well as developers.
What are ARK’s future prospects?
Ark team is regularly updating the holders about the progress they make on all fronts. They are a major cornerstone of Ark’s steady growth and bright future. The other pillar of the ecosystem are its participants: users/voters and delegated. The community is inclusive, well-educated on blockchain tech and friendly towards newbies which is one of the secrets of attracting new capital and buyers into the Ark ecosystem.
Ark delegates are also contributing to the ecosystem with little incidents (like one neglectful delegate leaving his private key exposed to the hackers) and no verifiable accusations of their collusion which is a frequent occurrence in other dPoS projects like Lisk or EOS.
Here is a nice overview of ARK’s advantages in comparison to its closest competition and blockchain they forked from Lisk:
“Totally different projects. Different directions. But let’s give a brief overview of the some things. Ark is 8 second block times, lisk is 10 seconds blocks. Ark is a completely brand new code base custom from ground up, lisk is old crypti codebase. Ark can currently push 19 TPS but is testing even higher on devnet, lisk can handle 2 TPS atm.
Ark has like 17 SDK, lisk has none or has been building one for 2 years. Ark has interoperability and connected to btc, Ltc, eth. Lisk has not. Ark has plugins and you can make smart contracts with hyperledger plugin, lisk does not. Ark has the worlds first dpos dynamic fee structure, lisk does not. Arks voting structure is 1 ark = 1 vote and one address can only vote for one account, lisk voting allows one address and 1 lisk to vote for all of their 101 delegates which made collusion and makes lisk highly centralized.
Ark chains and the deployer allow anyone to make a blockchain and token in minutes that is interoperable, lisk doesn’t do this yet. Ark has the best desktop wallet and mobile wallets in crypto, that is a shot at everyone not lisk. Ark integrated and partnered with ledger hardware wallets so you can interact directly in the ark wallets, I think ark was the first dpos ever on a hardware wallet and like the 8th coin ever added to ledger.
Lisk is still working on this, I think one of their community guys is working on it still. Man seems like I could go on forever about this, I am sure many more will add to this post. Do some research and see what ark is all about. I personally love that ark doesnt waste development funds on paying for big office buildings and eating money on unnecessary office people.
Ark team is remote and just keep doing worlds firsts instead of talking about it and hiring office managers. One more thing, why do people even compare these two anymore? I can think of a few other projects that are on arks level, but this comparison seems one sided. Ok I’m done now. “
Ark Core 2 functioning without a hitch
After two full weeks of the new Core v2 software functioning almost without a hitch, the team felt confident enough to release a blog post explaining their further intentions with Ark. The base has been set and the developers plan on churning out several new updates in the near future. The team will use a so called Semver model of rolling out updates, with patches and minor upgrades set to follow the major 2.0.0 release.
Initial 2.1.0 minor update will bring migration from JavaScript to TypeScript. TS is a much more strict language which allows for “tighter” coding and for a wider diversity of coders to get involved in the coding process. This update is in its “final stages”.
2.2.0 is expected to bring infrastructure improvements for AIP 11 and AIP 18. This will include increasing the VendorField to 256 bytes to open more use cases and possibilities to take the full advantage of Ark’s SmartBridge approach. The p2p side will become more serialized as nodes are expected to communicate by sending serialized buffers of transactions and blocks.
2.3.0 introduces the AIP 11, or Ark improvement protocol; this’ll introduce new transaction types designed to increase the flexibility and usability of the ecosystem. Transaction types in question will include timelock, multipayment, delegate resignation and IPFS. It also introduces AIP 18, aka multisignature protocol.
2.4.0 will bring Core CLI/Core app via yarn global and turn the software into an npm module that can be installed globally.
2.5.0 will signal the end of support for v1 of the API/RPC andshould come around mid-2019.
ARK will continue releasing these updates on a similarschedule (2.6.0, 2.7.0, 2.8.0, 2.9.0) before ARK Core 3.0.0 signals the end ofthe v2 upgrade cycle and brings a refractored plugin system. ArkVM will bedeveloped alongside the Core and both of those cycles are expected to be doneby the end of 2019. Read the full Ark post-v2 roadmap here.
