October is here! Is it just me or did September fly by? Halloween is right around the corner and ARK is one month closer to the release of Core V2. September was another great month for the ARK Ecosystem on all fronts and our team continues to push forward harder than ever. We made positive progress this month on Core V2 and DEVNET testing, hired 2 new developers, announced an exciting new partnership, and had a great trip to Consensus Singapore.

Let’s recap!

DEVELOPMENT

In September, the development team continued to work on Core V2 and public testing of the current DEVNET build. We pushed one progress report discussing our Pure PostgreSQL Integration, modernizing the P2P API, and several other small tweaks to Core V2.

In addition to the updates to DEVNET, we announced a new structured testing model that will consist of four targeted periods of testing. This series of tests will help prepare the team, the network, and the delegates for the release of Core V2 to MAINNET. During this period, we will focus testing as follows:

Period 1: Multisignatures

Period 2: Dynamic Fees

Period 3: Stress Testing

Period 4: Snapshots, Forking, Double Forging, and other common nuisances from V1

We also published a new version of our Mobile Wallet that includes the ability to add additional ARK Chains from within the mobile wallet (just like with our desktop wallet), compatibility with V2 and our V2 DEVNET, as well as the much requested Mobile DARK MODE!

HIRING

In September, we welcomed two new members to the ARK Crew. Both new hires will be ARK Core developers and will be focused on helping to finalize V2 for MAINNET and assisting in the development of ARK Improvement Proposal (AIP) 11, our next major milestone. If you haven’t already, please welcome Joshua Noack and Vasil Dimov to the team. They are a welcome addition to the team and have already started to make their presence known on github!

PARTNERSHIPS

September saw the announcement of an exciting new partnership with Major League Hacking (MLH), the official student hackathon league. As many of you know, we are big proponents of hackathons as a means to spread the word about ARK to young and innovative developers.

Through our partnership with MLH, we will be joining their MLH Localhost program to build an open source workshop and presentation specifically catered to ARK and blockchain creation. This will allow us to expand our reach within the hackathon circuit and continue to put ARK in the hands of as many developers as possible.

Last month we announced our partnership with Ø Crypto Union to bring crypto-backed “credits”, allowing users to borrow fiat money by utilizing their ARK as collateral. In September, the Ø Crypto Union team began working with select ARK community members and delegates to roll out the first tests of their system. We are excited to see the results of the testing phase and encouraged to see the progress the Ø Crypto Union team is making with their platform.

OUTREACH & EVENTS

Several members of the ARK team attended Consensus Singapore and it was an amazing opportunity to meet a different segment of the industry. We were amazed at the number of people who were not only familiar with ARK, but who said they had been following since our launch. The ARK glasses were a big hit and we got a chance to connect with several really great teams, including several partners such as Blockfolio and Changelly.

If you want to know more about our trip to Consensus Singapore, I sat down with Justin Renken for Episode 007 of The ARK Crypto Podcast and answered some questions about the conference along with V2, our recent hiring push, and several other topics.

And here are some of the images from Singapore…