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Changelog

Keep up-to-date with our progress on building the Ark protocol.

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18 December 2024

All payments are now arkoor by default

We’ve made a big shift in Ark payment policy: all payments will now be arkoor, and in-round transactions are reserved for refreshing VTXOs only.

This took a massive refactor, but the payoff is huge: Ark rounds are now way more reliable thanks to reduced interactivity requirements, and Ark wallets consume fewer resources across devices (mobile users won’t have to worry about killing their batteries anymore!).

Importantly, the change gives users far more control over their preferred fees and security model.

For a deep dive on the change, see our recent blog article.

Zero-fee transactions

Bitcoind 28.0 brought zero-fee VTXOs to Ark. By using child-pays-for-parent to confirm transactions instead, your Ark payments will now be even cheaper and even more reliable—especially for exits (but hopefully you’ll never need those).

Structured logging

The ASP daemon now comes with structured logging. Parsing logs, building dashboards, testing, and setting alerts for ASP operations will now be way easier.

VTXOs and UTXOs stored together in the same database

In October, we replaced the VTXO database with SQLite. And now, thanks to BDK's native SQLite support, your on-chain UTXOs are stored in the same database.

Rustls encryption

We’ve switched out OpenSSL in favour of Rustls. In our opinion, Rustls is a higher quality implementation that will make Ark more secure and easier to build upon.

31 October 2024

Database now running on SQLite

Our biggest update this month was migrating bark to an SQLite database. We chose SQLite because it's ridiculously stable, works on a wide range of hardware, and is easy for any developer to pick up because it's been around for so long. SQLite is what you use when you don’t want to lose important data, and there's little data more important than bitcoin data!

Screenshot of SQLite database in use

Updated to BDK beta 4

In October, we integrated two successive releases of BDK, going from beta2 to beta4. BDK is central to bark, our Ark client implementation. It enables us to quickly and easily build a fully-fledged bitcoin wallet, literally doing everything out-of-the-box. So we continue to look forward to the upcoming stable 1.0 release. You know what to do, Spiral!

On-demand syncing

Bark now only does an on-chain sync when it’s actually required. This ensures bark loads faster and feels a lot more snappy.

Contributor shoutouts

We also want to give a shoutout to three first-time contributors:

  • adbd7e7 added a very-necessary fallbackfee to our demo script. [110]
  • Acidbunny21 made it easy to offboard specific VTXOs without leaving dust inside the ASP. [87]
  • kevkevinpal added some very helpful aspd commands to the documentation. [103]

Thank you for your contributions!