Are you of the view that an increase in the use of blockchain is a worthy cause? Then you have an ally in Ark.

Ark is a project with the aim of facilitating users adoption of blockchain technology among other things. One of the visions of the Ark team is to bring blockchain technology to the masses. To realize this dream they intend to provide practical services for real people along with a fast, secure core technology.

One of the ways that the Ark team is accomplishing this feat is by building an ecosystem that will permit any business or individual to create their independent blockchain in a few minutes. To get these ideas moving swiftly, the Ark team is emphasizing the integration of as many coding languages and blockchains as feasible and providing users with the best possible experience.

A Peep Into Ark History

The Ark blockchain was launched by a truly decentralized team in February 2017 by a group consisting of 27 members spread across the globe. Presently the principal team contains 17 members.

One of the primary initiator, as well as the current Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Ark (ARK), is FX Thoorens. He was a core developer at Lisk before joining the team to work on the Ark project.

Ark was modeled dramatically after three older projects – Bitshares, Lisk, and Crypti- that were using the Delegated Proof of Stake (dPoS) consensus algorithm, a variation of the traditional Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithms.

Ark Unique Selling Points

There are some fundamental features that are being incorporated into the Ark ecosystem that will aid the project in achieving its aim of making blockchain technology more accessible. These core features are:

SmartBridges

Alternative Programming Languages

Push Button Deployable Blockchains

Smart Bridges

The concept of Smart Bridge will be utilized by ARK to create bridges between different incompatible blockchains. In other words, ARK will be an intermediary between the blockchains.

This would allow for communication between disparate blockchains as well as the capacity to trigger events on other chains. Although other projects have been working on a similar function, it is yet to be feasible.

The amazing thing is that SmartBridges can be activated with just a snippet of code provided by ARK.

One of the ways of using SmartBridges will be through exchanges that would use encoded listeners to ascertain when a transaction is an exchange transaction. It would then process the transaction(s) automatically while still charging the usual fee.

For instance, a user could send 100 ARK to their Coinbase wallet, and Coinbase would recognize the transfer as an exchange transaction and automatically convert the ARK to ETH before depositing it in the user’s wallet.

Ark Alternative Programming Languages

The ARK developers were quite clear in their intention of allowing development in as many coding languages as possible, consequently involving as many software developers as possible. All of the following programming languages are currently supported by Ark:

Python

Elixer

RPC

Java

.NET

Go

PHP/Laravel

TypeScript API

Nucleid

Ruby

Swift iOS

Symfony

Javascript

Kotlin

Lua

The Ark team is likewise promising support for R, C, Advanced PowerShell, Rust, and C++ will soon be available.

Push Button Deployable Blockchains.

This would enable anyone to easily form the Ark blockchain and create their own blockchain project. Even though it is similar to Ethereum, it is without the cost. Also these newly deployed chains come with fully functional SmartBridges.

Delegated Proof -of-Stake

Instead of using the controversial proof-of-work consensus algorithm, Ark is using a Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. Meaning that there is no costly hardware or electricity usage required as the (ARK) network is secured by delegates. Although anyone could be a delegate, only 51 people can actually become delegates currently and they are usually chosen through a voting system by Ark token holders.

Ark (ARK) Token and Ark (ARK) Fees

Ark was launched with 100 million tokens in early 2017. The network fee for sending ARK to another wallet is 0.1 ARK .to register as a delegate cost 25ARK and to vote or unvote a delegate cost 1 ARK.

There are plans to change these fees as the network becomes bigger and more efficient. The plan is to reduce the fees with the next core update.

It will then be 0.01 ARK as network fee for sending, 0.02 ARK for voting on a delegate and 10 ARK to register as a delegate.

The Ark team seems to be creating a very useful resource for the blockchain industry in its entirety.

The fact that they are not the only project looking to link up disparate blockchains does not make their work of less value, particularly if they succeed where others fail.

The project is ambitious one as the team plans to build a user interface that will make blockchain technology accessible to the majority of people.