With August now officially in the books, it’s safe to say that this was one of our most exciting and productive months yet. Whether it was Core v2 development, new hires, partnership announcements, or upcoming events, ARK had something for everyone in the month of August.

Let’s recap.

DEVELOPMENT

August brought the re-launch of the ARK Core V2 DevNet after the decision to push for a Hard Fork vs a Soft Fork. We also pushed not one, but two new development updates that included over 155 new commits from 10+ developers with thousands of new lines of code added. The team is making steady progress towards the refinement of Core V2 and we are very happy with how things are shaping up.

We also published an update for the Core V1 MainNet node with several bug fixes and potential security vulnerability fixes also. With Core V1 soon to be retired, this may be the last official update to the V1 software.

During August, our team made a conscious effort to work on the frequency of our development updates. Our intention moving forward is to keep to a bi-weekly development update schedule similar to what we published in August. This allows enough time for the development team to make steady progress while allowing us to keep the community and our community developers up to speed on all of the hard work being done by the dev team.

In September, our key focus will be continued testing of Core V2 and the dynamic fee system as well as updates to several of our other key product lines, including updating ARK Mobile Wallet with all the latest fixes and new features.

HIRING

The ARK Crew welcomed four new family members in the month of August and we can’t wait to show you what they bring to the table. We brought on Erwann Gentric as a new Core Developer and QA Engineer, Mario Vega to help with Technical Documentation, Justin Renken to help round out our Communications Team (and now host of The ARK Crypto Podcast), and Carlye Wicklund to be a Community Manager & Support Specialist. We also welcomed Gerard Blezer on July 31st to serve as a Finance and Compliance Manager to assist our CFO, Lars Rensing.

Each of these hires brings something unique to the table that we believe will help ARK continue to innovate and stay at the top of our game. Stay tuned for even more hiring announcements in September!

PARTNERSHIPS

In August, we announced two new partnerships that will help flesh out the ARK Ecosystem and provide new applications and services for our users.

The first partnership is with a company called Ø Crypto Union, a service that will bring access to crypto-backed ‘credits’, allowing users to borrow fiat money by using their ARK as collateral. This will also grant access to Ø credit and debit cards giving users instant access to holdings. We also conducted an AMA with the Ø Crypto Union team. You can read the log of that AMA on the ARK subreddit.

Our second new partnership is with MARAChain. Their goal is to bring the secure exchange of GDPR-compliant digital documents to the blockchain. As part of our partnership, MARAChain will be a fully featured bridge-chain using the ARK platform as the basis for their custom blockchain solution and will contribute to the development of our custom IPFS module.

These partnerships will bring two exciting new ways to interact within the ARK Ecosystem and continue to show the growing interest in using the ARK Blockchain Toolkit as a base platform for new and exciting blockchain projects.

We see these types of partnerships as critical to the success of the ARK Ecosystem, and our team is always looking for our next great partner. If you are building a blockchain-focused project and aren’t sure where to start, send us a message at partnerships@ark.io with a brief description of your idea and we would love to show you how the ARK Blockchain Toolkit can help you make your idea a reality.

ARK GIVES QUARTERS

On August 24th, the world as we know it changed forever. That’s right folks, “ARK Gives No Dates” is no more. The popular saying from the ARK Crew, so popular in fact, that an enterprising community member made specialized challenge coins with the motto, has come to an end (sort of) as ARK now gives quarters.

The official ARK Roadmap has been updated to reflect upcoming general release windows by quarter. We also took this opportunity to make several improvements to the items on the roadmap as well as removed some items that we believe will be perpetually in development and no longer make sense to track by percentage completion.

DISCORD

You asked and we delivered. ARK now has its own official Discord. Many community members have expressed their dislike for the limited message retention that Slack offers. With useful development conversations happening in our public Slack regularly, losing that history can be frustrating. For the immediate future we will be running both the official Slack and Discord as we monitor the situation. Join the new ARK Discord and let us know what you think. Do you prefer Slack or Discord?

UPCOMING EVENTS

Last but not least, several members of the ARK Crew will be traveling to attend Consensus Singapore in mid-September (ARK is a sponsor). Consensus Singapore is a part of a larger tech and blockchain based week called TechXLR8 Asia. Joining 5G Asia, IoT World Asia, NV & SDN, the AI Summit, and Project Kairos Asia, Consensus: Singapore will feature 75+ speakers and 50+ sponsors across 2 ½ days of powerful insights, industry announcements, and cross-industry networking opportunities.

If you plan on attending Consensus Singapore, stop by our booth to say hello and get some of our famous ARK Swag.