The ARK ACES team has released the developers documentation site for the Listener Framework and Service Framework. Please feel free to browse and read through each documentation site:

ACES Listener Framework Documentation

ACES Service Framework Documentation

Both sites are related to prior API and SDK releases which can be found in the Encoded Listener API repository and the Service API repository on the ACES Github page. Developers can now begin building their own encoded listener and marketplace services for ARK. Our team will be using this framework to build a two-way Bitcoin/ARK encoded listener, and we welcome other development teams to work with us to connect their coins to ARK. Come find us on the ARK slack in the #ACES channel.

Overview of ARK-ACES Encoded Listener

The ACES Encoded Listener API defines a standard protocol to facilitate the consumption of blockchain transaction events across numerous different blockchains. Encoded Listeners are implemented separately for each blockchain.

The Encoded Listener API specifies only the base necessary capabilities for consuming blockchain transaction events in a generic way that can be supported across many different blockchains. All implementations conforming to the ACES Encoded Listener API specification can be consumed using the common client libraries and processing logic, allowing different blockchains to be easily plugged into an application, including ACES Services.

The diagram below shows an example flow of requests between the consumer, the encoded listener, and a blockchain. When a consumer creates a subscription, they are subscribing to receive data from a blockchain.

Overview of ARK-ACES Service

At the center of the ACES Service API is the Service Contract. Each service defines and operates on one type of contract. A Service Contract defines a particular service a provider is able to fulfil, which can be anything from uploading a file to a storage blockchain, performing value transfers, creating smart contracts, executing code on blockchain based computing platforms, or interacting with IoT hardware.

The diagram below shows an example of the flow that occurs between a consumer, the ACES service, and various blockchains. The consumer is this case is a user (or application), executing the various specialized contracts provided by the ACES host.

Next Steps

The next release will include both an ARK encoded listener implementation and a Bitcoin encoded listener node implementation. These will be more technical, without a UI, but will demonstrate the ability to interact with Bitcoin specialized ARK transactions.