Introduction
🤔 Why Ark?
Bitcoin is the world's most secure and censorship-resistant blockchain. However, it's not the fastest or the cheapest. Ark is a layer-two protocol designed to scale Bitcoin transactions. It uses a shared UTXO model for off-chain payments through an intermediary server that cannot access your funds.
🧐 Does Ark require covenants?
No (but they improve Ark a lot!). A covenant-less version of Ark is possible on Bitcoin today! Through the documentation, we will refer to the covenant-less version as clArk and the covenant version as Ark. To better understand the impact of covenants and the drawbacks of clArk, check out the Ark vs clArk page to see the differences between the two implementations.
📜 How Does Ark Work?
Head over our Learn section to understand the Ark protocol in detail.
🏃♀️ Running Ark
You can join an existing Ark service provider or run your own on the Liquid Network. The support for the covenant-less version for Bitcoin is work in progress and tracked on Github.
To get started, follow the guides below:
👩💻 Integrate Ark
🚧 Work in progress The Ark libraries and developer tools are currently under development. Please check back soon for updates.
You can will integrate Ark into your wallet or application to enable your users to send and receive Bitcoin payments off-chain.
⌨️ Contributing
We welcome contributions from the community. If you'd like to contribute to the reference implementation, please see the Ark GitHub.
➰ Stay in the Loop
- Join our developer chat on Discord.
- Ask questions or get help on Stack Overflow.
- Join our community on Telegram.
⚖️ License
By contributing to this repository, you agree to license your work under the MIT license, unless specified otherwise. Contributions not originally authored by you must include a license header with the original author(s) and source.