I thought it would be interesting to write an article about what happened in the Ark project last year. The Ark Token Exchange Campaign came to and end in December 2016. This article will sum up the history thereafter.

I will try to focus on the highlights of each month. During the entire year the project saw growth in all dimensions. I will not be able to cover them all.

January 2017

After the TEC the Ark project was rather quiet. There was no blog posts during the month and only two reddit posts.

Most likely everyone was busy with testing the new network.

February 2017

The preparations for mainnet launch was starting to take shape and become known to the public. A first blog post announced how to pepare and setup an Ark node.

It was also the launch of the Desktop wallet with some guides for it. There was no single reddit post about Ark this month. All discussions were happening on the team slack.

March 2017

Ark mainnet launch was announced at the beginning of the month and was scheduled for March 21st.

Mainnet launched successfully and was followed by a lot of activity including launch of the bounty program.

There were a total of 16 reddit post during the month. Most activity did happen on slack.

Trading options were launched very soon after mainnet launch and you could soon trade Ark on Cryptopia and Bittrex. Ark was also listed on coinmarketcap and started to get coverage of different media channels.

April 2017

After the launch there were several updates and fixes.

Pretty soon after the dust of the launch settled the first two API’s were published. Javark did allow any Java programmer to work with Ark and community developers added arky, a python API.

The main community was still on slack which was growing very fast.

Side note: Jarunik started to post daily updates on reddit.

May 2017

In May the Ark Community Fund (ACF) was launched.

As every month there were various updates rolled out. There was already a second API ready with arknet.

The community was actively participating in the French Open contest.

The slack, reddit and twitter community were growing fast and a lot of newcomers were introduced to Ark.

June 2017

Ark sponsored and participated in the first Hackathon to market Ark in developer communities.

The community developers were also very active and Ark-Go was published.

The community was still growing at a very fast pace.

July 2017

It was planned and announced that Ark will support Ledger Nano S in July. Unfortunately the launch had to be rescheduled.

In preparation for some future modules the typescript API was launched in July.

Ark was also presenting at the Fintech Week in New York.

August 2017

It was time to improve the desktop wallet.

It was the start of continuous improvements on the wallet.

There were also a lot of additional API’s added which have been coded in the months since launch.

Ark Ruby

Ark Swift

Nucleid

As the developer community was getting bigger and bigger it was time to reactivate the development network to have a playground for everyone.

September 2017

After a long wait the support for Ledger Nano S was finally available and people quickly switched to use the more secure hardware wallet option.

The ACES team had been working silently in the background and published the first Smartbridge to Ethereum as a community project.

The community was growing faster and faster and the team expanded as well by hiring a full time designer.

It was the start of the redesign of all Ark features.

October 2017

As a first step the Ark website itself was completely rebuilt in a new design.

It was a very busy month including a lot of updates to all designs of existing features including launch of the new explorer.

One of the major new features was supporting Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) in order to be compatible with common ways exchanges integrate different blockchains. This also allowed to be listed on binance in order to have more than one big exchange.

November 2017

There were a lot of small udpates and fixes on all modules and API’s and also new API’s were published making Ark accessibly from pretty every programming language.

The main highlight of November was the launch of the own business entity in France.

Based on the huge success on growth of the Ark project and blockchain it became obvious that Ark in it’s current implementation will not scale as desired. The Ark team announced to rebuild the entire core from scratch and update Ark version 2.

December 2017

Ark launched it’s mobile wallets.

On top of that the entire project was active on all fronts:

Hiring more team members

Bugfixing and improving modules

Planning conferences and hackathons

Working on partnerships.

What’s next?

Hard to say as “Ark gives no dates”.

The current roadmap is packed with new features and the entire community and project is getting bigger and bigger.

Some of the main features I am looking forward to:

Ark Core V2

Ark Virtual Machine

Push button deployable blockchains

You can check progress on the roadmap yourself:

Delegate Jarunik