Ark -Bridging the blockchains

In my absens from steemit, I have had the chance to look closer into the steaming hot topic of crypto. Ark is most definitely hot. Ranking at 60-40 at cmc in the beginning of summer, it has shot up and claimed a space around 20 for quite some time now.

The reason why I got interested in this is like many other things coincidence. In my case the coincidence that I had mined some shitcoins and wondered where I could make value of the effort. The shitcoins were only possible to sell on cryptopia and sure enough, ark is also listed there. I took my time and managed to buy a few in late April. Since I have bought more. A lot more.

So what is ark?

There is many answers to the question. Because ark aims at being many things. They aim at being consumer friendly while at the same time connecting advanced services, wether be it another blockchain or an iot device. It's quite hard to pinpoint, but for an outsider, the first thing to notice, their wallet software is easy, customizable and evidently meant to scale in the future.

However, this is just what you see to begin with. They call it the ark ecosystem. The aim: to talk to everyone. To be able to do everything from within the ark sphere. Ambitious? Sure! And we are far from completing that aim!

Smart bridges and encoded listeners

Imagine you could pay with bitcoin on the Ethereum network. Haha, you can't do that, you would say. Not for now anyway.

But you can if you had Ark instead of bitcoin. What's more, you can even interact with smart contracts.

This is smart bridge functionality. It's not a full smart bridge yet. That would require the Ethereum network to add a few lines of code to their network.

So for the user the difference is you have to trust a encoded listener, which is running both ark and ether blockchains to do the transaction. When it is implemented as a smart bridge it will be trustless, without any third parties.

The difference is trivial it might seem. But it has the same problem as swiping a Visa card: you leave the transaction in the hands of others.

So clearly a smart bridge is preferable. But that means the bridged chain has to accept some code in order to make it work. Mitigating the trust conundrum is also in the works by setting up a market place where the competing encoded listeners can be scrutinized for price and rating. And yes, anyone can set up an encoded listener.

One-click deployable blockchain

Leaving the smart bridges for a sec, ark wants to clone itself easily. You can do it today, just go to their github and knock yourself out. But they work on streamlining the process so that the chains can be created with simple parameters and one-click-ready blockchain.

Now the smart bridging part becomes more obvious as strategic choice. The clones will have smart bridging capability built in from the beginning.

Integration

Ark can be integrated into almost any software. The list of supported languages is more extensive than I have ever seen anywhere. It includes:

Python
Elixir
RPC
Java
.Net
R
C
Go
Advanced PowerShell
Rust
Kotlin
PHP/Laravel
TypeScript API
C++
Nucleid
Ruby
Swift iOS

11 languages finnished, 6 still in development. And I have never even heard of some of them

Ark VM

With functionality similar to Ethereum.

wallets, payment systems

The ark wallet for desktop computers is outstanding. Simple, customizable and feature rich. It's not difficult to see that the role model is lisks nanowallet. But it is more. Much more. And it's as colorful as you like it. It can also be used with ledger nano to be completely safe. Ark was the first dpos chain to get hw wallet support.

Community

The ark community is by far the best I have ever found in crypto space. The delegates and the voting process invites the user to interact. It is a relaxed environment without the typical crypto shill. We do things our way and release it when we think it deserves it is a common answer when questions about upcoming releases arise. Just as it should be. I have heard it over and over in any slack or group I have joined that it's "soon". In ark it is when it's ready.

So the chances of broken promises are small. You can anyway guesstimate the progresses by following the advancements on the roadmap portion of the website.

And if you need to know more

Ark.io is full of more information

The slack forum is always ready to help. In addition there are groups on telegram and on discord.