ARK claims to be creating an all-in-one blockchain solution for consumers and developers, similar to Lisk (which itself is a fork). The main innovation in both is to enable users to easily deploy their own blockchain. .

While nearly all cryptocurrencies struggle to achieve mainstream adoption, several specific barriers keep consumers from buying or using a specific cryptocurrency. ARK’s technology seeks to help other cryptocurrencies achieve this goal. Among its many advantages, ARK ensures that its wallets are very easy for the “average Joe”. With ARK, everything is designed to be simple and clear (a philosophy also shared by the XTRABYTES design team).

Another feature set to help ARK’s mass adoption is its speed. ARK currently has a block speed of roughly eight seconds, fairly fast for a coin that interconnects other coins. In order to achieve this speed, ARK employs a mining algorithm called “Delegated Proof of Stake”. The latter provides for the minting of new coins by a group of 51 delegates. Elected by ARK owners, these delegates, in turn, determine what percentage of the staking reward they will share with their voters. This process is essentially a modified proof-of-stake consensus with a limited number of validators (51 delegates). In principle, it appears somewhat similar to XTRABYTES’ network structure (3584 STATIC nodes). However, the true capability and architecture of Proof-of-Signature remains to be seen.

As originally conceived, ARK creates ready-to-deploy blockchains that operate with the push of a button. In essence, anyone seeking to fork ARK can do so with a push button deployable blockchain. These blockchains (along with every blockchain that contains an encoded listener) are connected to the main chain via smart-bridging. ARK’s technology allows startups to create their own blockchain in a simple and straightforward manner.

You can read more about ARK here.

The team at ARK is creating what they call a SmartBridge.

The ARK SmartBridge will allow blockchains to connect and communicate with each other. This means one would be able to act on a different blockchain with the ARK token. Here are a few examples:

Example 1: If you wanted to trigger an ETH smart contract but hold ARK, you could just send the instructions through ARK SmartBridge, right in the wallet to trigger the event. The code embedded in the ETH chain is always listening for an ARK SmartBridge transaction and will collect this info and trigger the function to issue a contract. Example 2: You want to issue a record entry in Factom, but you only hold ARK. So you would go to your ARK wallet, enter the correct info and instructions for the FCT chain via the SmartBridge tab. Then send it. That’s it, now the FCT chain receives the info and acts appropriately.

SmartBridge technology also allows ARK to remain scalable, as ARK can off-load its non-essential functions to several side-chains. Although scalability remains a vexing issue for many cryptocurrencies, ARK claims to have smartly solved this. Nonetheless, the viability of side-chain scaling has ignited heated debates among cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

In order to satisfy developers, ARK has made its push-button ready-to-deploy blockchains support as many programming languages as possible. As a result, ARK developers can program in Python, Elixir, RPC, Lua, Java, .NET, R, C, Go, Rust, Kotlin, PHP/Laravel, Symfony, TypeScript API, C++, Nucleid, Ruby and Swift iOS. Not incidentally, this is the same philosophy that lies at the core of the XTRABYTES project. However, its XTRABYTES’ code-agnostic DICOM API that allows developers to write DApps in any language. The DICOM API also allows developers to access XTRABYTES’ core features and data. All that will be needed is the ability to call on the API functions within the specific code.

And as a result, developers from a wide array of fields will be able to jump into coding XTRABYTES DApps quickly and easily. Furthermore, ARK will allow these developers to easily deploy a blockchain in their language of choice. With these two options, developers might find themselves creating a Dapp in their favorite language, deploying it on the XTRABYTES network, then using ARK’s push-button blockchain capability to deploy their own blockchain (coded in that very language). They might then use ARK’s SmartBridge to have their blockchain interact with the Dapp they deployed on the XBY network.

Although both projects appear to reside in the same cryptocurrency space, the nature of their relationship appears to be more complementary than competitive.