Company Name Ark Labs
Founders: Marco Argentieri e Simone Giacomelli
Date founded: June 2024
The location of the headquarters: Europe
No. of employees Six full-time employees
Website: https://arklabs.to/
Public or private? They are a group of people who share the same values.
Marco Argentieri started his Bitcoin career ten years ago after graduating high school.
His first work included helping others make bitcoin remittances. Argentieri began to view bitcoin less as an investment and more as a form of currency.
“I had many people that were using Bitcoin because it was like a Western Union without the KYC hurdles, and it was much cheaper back then,” Argentieri spoke to Bitcoin Magazine.
“They were not even interested in bitcoin price or volatility. They were just using it to send money overseas,” He also added.
Argentieri’s mission is the same in 2024: to help people use bitcoin easily, privately, and cheaply. He does it now in a much more sophisticated manner via his company Ark LabsArgentieri, along with his team of developers have developed the Bitcoin layer 2 Argentieri.
What is Ark?
Ark is a protocol that was created as an open source to assist in scaling Bitcoin. Users can amortize the price of a single transaction on chain across multiple off-chain exchanges. The swaps are performed on Ark servers and best suit Bitcoin users with Lightning nodes.
Ark servers are designed to alleviate the Lightning liquidity limitations by allowing the users to receive money off-chain via vTXOs, or Virtual Transaction Outputs. This eliminates the requirement to create a channel to receive liquidity and/or to accept it. Ark servers run the off-chain systems, and also allow unilateral withdrawals from chain.
Ark is able to source and provide liquidity (instead relying solely on peers like Lightning). Argentieri chose Ark to solve Lightning’s problems after realizing its shortcomings.
“Looking at a current scaling solution like Lightning, the developers were idealistic in the sense that they were saying ‘Okay, people should hold the keys, which is a big, big, big step. And plus they also run server and plus they also became very expert in liquidity management and whatnot,” Argentieri explains. “I think that hasn’t been a very realistic assumption for how people operate.”
Ark Labs was founded by Argentieri under the pretense that, just like most people did not want to be experts at running Lightning nodes for payment 10 years ago and today they do not want to learn how to run Lightning nodes.
“Ark tries to build on top of this assumption that there will be specialized people or specialized enterprises that know how to handle liquidity, and that’s what we call Ark servers,” He explained.
“Then you have like the clients — people that only want to send or receive a payment and use bitcoin. They don’t really want to get into all the complexity,” He added.
“Ark starts by assuming that not everyone is a peer, so there will be a liquidity provider on one side and a user on the other side. We acknowledge that this is the natural course of things — even though we may not like it.”
Argentieri is a pragmatic who acknowledges the central design of Ark may not be perfect philosophically, but it’s effective.
“The goal again was to have a protocol that starts working backwards from the user perspective and not from an ideal scenario,” Argentieri explains.
“If you think from the user perspective, they really just want to have a user experience that looks like Bitcoin on-chain. With Bitcoin on-chain, you just have a key pair. You just create a simple key and, boom, you can receive,” He went on to explain how Ark functions.
Bitcoin Interest Rate
Argentieri believes that Ark can be a source of liquidity for UTXO holders, particularly those who live in Western countries.
“In the Western world, we know people really are attached to this concept of yield,” said Argentieri.
“Westerners cannot just hold sats in cold storage and be good with it. They really feel that they’re missing something,” With a chuckle, he continued.
In exchange for a fee, Ark will allow willing participants to become liquidators. This allows them to both provide liquidity to Ark servers and satisfy the thirst of Westerners for profit.
“Ark is really like a way to introduce a bitcoin interest rate,” posited Argentieri. “Ark can be a discovery mechanism for a real true native interest rate for Bitcoin.”
Argentieri outlined how liquidity providers are able to share a percentage of bitcoins they hold via what Argentieri calls an “warm wallet,” Ark has the ability to access any wallet with keys.
The yield will come from transaction fees through the VTXO Model. Argentieri has said that while some people may view this as “financializing bitcoin,” He sees this as a simple win-win situation, and a means to scale up while rewarding those who have the financial resources to do so.
Sizing Horizontally
Ark is a solution that helps Bitcoin to scale horizontally. According to Argentieri, a layer-2 solution such as Lightning can help Bitcoin to scale vertically.
“With Lightning, we set up one address and then two people can do an infinite amount of transactions between each other — but that doesn’t scale,” He said.
Ark can enable a UTXO to support an exponentially greater number of transactions compared the the amount of money in the UTXO. Argentieri gave an example where 100 BTC could provide liquidity to tens or thousands of transactions.
Ark is not only a way to make more transactions but also enables you to use it in the same ways as Bitcoin.
“People are very focused on Ark for payments, but the beauty of Ark is that you retain most of the UTXO capability, which means that you can do 95% of things you can do in Bitcoin right now on ARK,” said Argentieri. “You can do multisig and you can open multiple channels with a single address.”
Argentieri shared with us that Ark can be as insecure as Bitcoin. Even if Ark closes down its servers, you will still have your Sats available on the blockchain.
“If for any reason the server goes away, censors me or goes offline, the whole virtual transactions tree goes on-chain,” Argentieri explains. “This is what we call unilateral exit.”
Ark: A Future of Ark
Argentieri stated that Ark has been hard at work preparing for the release of Ark Node Argentieri describes the B2B Enterprise-grade Offering as “a “plugin for your LND node” Rebalancing the liquidity of businesses is possible with this tool.
The following are some of the ways to get in touch with each other Bitcoin Amsterdam Ark Labs, announced last month a partnership. Boltz Ark Node is a way to facilitate Lightning Off-Chain Liquidity Management, with the goal of making swaps quicker, cheaper, and easier.
Argentieri’s Ark Labs has a number of other new developments in the pipeline, but it may take some time for the company to implement them.
“I’m living inside the action, so I wish to release things every week, but engineering takes time, especially when you are the first one doing these things,” He said.
The plan for now is to remain on mission — the latest state of the mission he embarked on ten years ago.
“We can really have a tangible result within the Bitcoin ecosystem,” Argentieri’s conclusion “People will see Bitcoin payments get better, and we hope to be part of the reason why that will happen.”
“This article is not financial advice.”
“Always do your own research before making any type of investment.”
“ItsDailyCrypto is not responsible for any activities you perform outside ItsDailyCrypto.”
Source: bitcoinmagazine.com
