ARK Monthly Newsletter — September 2019 Edition
September is in the box! This blog post will cover last month's highlights, activities, achievements, and unique content. Let’s take a look at what the team has been up to.
SEPTEMBER REMARKS
“September has been a great month for ARK development and achievements. Core v2.6, arguably the largest Core update so far, ended its development cycle during September and will be moving into a devnet release and testing cycle soon. ARK was also integrated into Atomic Wallet, giving users even more storage and swap options. Additionally, ARK is now available on Cryptocurrency Checkout, and users can use the service to purchase items from the ARK.io merch store and test out the integration. A key metric that interests me is the ARK.io Alexa ranking, which is currently in its fourth straight month of improvement and has more than halved since the new website launch in July. ARK is also looking to expand personnel even further in the development and marketing departments.”
Justin Renken, ARK.io Senior Brand Manager
SEPTEMBER’S TOP TWEET
https://twitter.com/ArkEcosystem/status/1174739346840313856?s=20
SEPTEMBER ARK TIMELINE
***ArkTimeline.com*** is a community resource built and maintained by the ARK Community Committee. The entire history of all ARK achievements and accomplishments are available there, and they are both sortable and filterable. Here’s a quick rundown for this past month:
ARK Highlights the ARK Advocate Program a New Initiative to Increase Community Collaboration
ARK Ecosystem Releases Mobile Wallet v1.5.2 Featuring Transaction Signing Issues Fix
ARK Ecosystem Celebrates One Year of Episodes of The ARK Crypto Podcast
ARK Ecosystem Announces ARK is Now Integrated into Atomic Wallet
ARK Ecosystem Releases New ARK.io Adventures Video Featuring Race Day with Crypto NASCAR
ARK Team is Expanding and Seeking a Growth Marketer to Join the Team
ARK’s Blockchain Application Development Tutorial Part 2/2 Highlighted by Hackernoon
ARK Team is Expanding its Development Department and Looking For Back-End Developers
ARK is Now Available On Cryptocurrency Checkout & Integrated in ARK Merch Shop
ARK Ecosystem Releases Desktop Wallet v2.6.2 Featuring Better Management of Unconfirmed Votes
ARK Ecosystem Releases Desktop Wallet v2.6.1 Featuring Improved Bridgechain Compatibility
See what the future holds for ARK at Roadmap.ARK.io.
SEPTEMBER ADVENTURES
This month, as suggested by ARK community member ‘Supercool,’ I traveled to Indianapolis, IN to catch the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race featuring the ARK32 driven by Corey Lajoie. If you missed it, check it out below:
SEPTEMBER FRANCE ACTIVITIES
ARK.io is incorporated as an SCIC in France, giving ARK a leg up when interfacing with the legacy financial system. This SCIC is the first of its kind for crypto in France.
- On September 2nd, ARK CEO Francois Thoorens had a two-hour interview with Thierry PIGOT, journalist of the newspaper “J’automatise”. It is a bimonthly magazine, dealing with automation, industrial control systems, robots and all the technologies that allow industrial production to fully enter the digital age.
- On September 17th, Francois Thoorens went to the Elysee Palace (official residence of the President) for a reception as part of the launch of France Digitale Day. France Digitale has been dubbed by some of the French media to be the “Davos for Startups.” During this event, French President Emmanuel MACRON announced in his speech that his government has convinced institutional investors to invest more heavily in late-stage VC funds and asset managers. Institutional investors have committed to investing $5.5 billion (€5 billion).
SEPTEMBER POWERED BY ARK UPDATE
The **Powered by ARK Program** aims to help recognize, support and collaborate with projects building on ARK’s technology. The first accepted official partner is **nOS**, the virtual operating system for the Smart Economy. Here’s a brief update and remarks from ARK Strategic Partnerships Manager Ray Alvarez:
“As the saying goes, there are no shortcuts to any place worth going. The team at nOS knows this and it shows in their constant progress as they hit milestone after milestone. Since joining the Powered by ARK Program on July 30th, The teams at nOS and ARK have fostered a collaborative relationship which is accelerating the pace at which nOS is achieving their goals.
September 30th marked another huge milestone for the team at nOS as they released their testnet, alpha blockchain, and block explorer. Not only does everything look sleek, but there is also a solid codebase which will serve as a strong foundation upon which the nOS project will be built. Currently, the testnet has features such as Staking NOS, Stake-powered voting for delegates, block rewards, a unique transaction fee model, and the block explorer.
We couldn’t be happier for the team at nOS and the progress they are making building their blockchain on ARK.”
Ray Alvarez, ARK Strategic Partnerships Manager
You can track nOS’s progress via their **blog by clicking here**.
SEPTEMBER AMAs
Ask-Me-Anythings were conducted during this month featuring ARK team members answering questions by the community on Slack.ARK.io. Here’s the list:
Follow ARK on Twitter for invitations to join future AMAs.
SEPTEMBER DEVELOPER ROUNDTABLE
The ARK Developer Roundtable is a monthly video call, conducted by ARK.io Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Kristjan Košič. These calls allow a unique opportunity to present information to the community and gain valuable insight from community developers. Here’s last month’s meeting:
Follow ARK on Twitter for invitations to join future roundtables.
SEPTEMBER DEVELOPMENT REPORT
The ARK Monthly Development Report covers all pull requests (opened, closed, merged) as well as all issues opened and closed in every ARK Ecosystem public repository, the number of contributors during that month, the number of new stargazers, and total lines of GitHub code added or deleted (**check September’s report here).**
SEPTEMBER NETWORK REPORT
This network report summarizes network activity on the ARK Public Network for the recent month.
Transactions
**Total: **159,533
**Avg per block: **0.4925
***Per type:
*Transfers: **158,738 (99.50%)
**Second Signatures: **3 (0.00%)
**Votes: **788 (0.49%)
Delegate Registrations: 4 (0.00%)
1,516 unique wallets sent an outgoing transaction.
Blocks
Full: 683 (0.21%)
**Empty: **315,314 (97.35%)
**Non-empty: **7,898 (2.44%)
**Total: **323,895
**Missed: **105
Fees
Total: 3286.65717614 Ѧ
Per type:
Transfers: 2982.78701589 Ѧ
**Second Signatures: **5.64312978 Ѧ
**Votes: **270.09682213 Ѧ
**Delegate Registrations: **28.13020834 Ѧ
Votes
**Voting Wallets: **41,692
Voting Wallets > 1 ARK : 18,977
**Total ARK Voting: **83472179.28683481 Ѧ
SEPTEMBER PODCASTS
The ***ARK Crypto Podcast*** releases weekly episodes all about ARK, featuring interviews, monologues, tutorials, reports, presentations, and more. The show aims for a 30-minute runtime and releases new episodes every Friday. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, Castbox, and more. Check out the episodes released this month:
The podcast will return after some upgrades and content refactors.
WHAT’S NEXT
The following month for ARK will focus on deploying Core v2.6 onto the ARK Devnet and initiate final testing phases. This is arguably the biggest Core iteration to date, and it will contain big functionality additions for developers. Check **Roadmap.ARK.io **for status updates. During this month, we will also be working with our recently selected group of ARK Advocates and start them on the training process for representing ARK at local events in their area. The ARK Subreddit will also get some upgrades that will enhance the community, and the end of the month features a large annual conference that ARK will attend.
FEEDBACK SURVEY
Take a short three-minute feedback survey so we can learn more about your opinions on how we’re doing. We review and track this feedback and use it to further improve our efforts.
**Take the three-minute feedback survey here**.
GET INVOLVED
Here’s a quick list of what your first steps might be to get involved with ARK:
Launch an ARK community service
Contribute code and earn ARK
Create a blockchain in three simple steps
Looking forward to October!
Read our new 2019 whitepaper, follow us on social media (Twitter|Facebook | Reddit ), join our community ( Slack | Discord ) and stay tuned to our blog on Medium and on Steemit.