In the previous post about Dynamic Fee marketplaces I promised to deliver monthly blogs on ARK and blockchain development, so here we go with my first 2019 blog post.

First things first:

🎆 Wishing you a Happy New Year — to a prosperous year of 2019.

We appreciate taking the journey with us!

Abstract:

In this post we will talk about the hype coming to an end and what are the next logical steps for all blockchain projects that want to follow the path of mass adoption, reaching plateau of productivity. We will shortly present what our activity after ARK Core v2 launch was and what is the current state of our promise related to automation and interoperability challenges in blockchain space.

The Blockchain’s Technology Road Ahead

Figure 1: Technology Hype Cycle as defined by Gartner Research

After all the hype in 2017, the year 2018 was a realistic check for many of the crypto-currency projects — it’s was a hard rocky downhill road, but this was to be expected as with any of the new emerging technologies on their path to mass adoption.

It’s hard to predict what the future will bring, but one thing is for sure, the technology is here to stay. As it moves from the rocky roads decline, through the trough of disillusionment (we are here) and starts to climb the slope of enlightenment, finally reaching the plateau of productivity (Figure 1).

A lot of predictions were already made, some of the recent ones prove that the technology is maturing, as most of the mentioned experts talk about benefits of the technology and not about the price/trading.

Personally I think this is the best way to move forward, deliver easy-to-use technology that will enable new use-cases and disrupt the existing ones. The key challenge here is to provide the tools and technology that makes this an easy switch — and this is where ARK’s main vision and motivation comes from.

Public vs Private Blockchains

The ongoing battle between proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work is slowly turning into the proof-of-stake benefit, especially looking at private chains and their requirements. Our flexible delegated-proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, that drastically reduces blockchain running costs and enables enterprises to run their secure private network with delegates as authorities of the network at blazing speeds with minimum resource usage.

You can read more about delegated-proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms here: https://docs.ark.io/introduction/blockchain/understanding-consensus-models.html#understanding-consensus-models.

Why Am I Mentioning This?

As you probably read in our roadmap for this year — related to the Core Blockchain: “We will continue improving and implementing new features with input from the community and wider audiences”. Working together by listening and understanding our early-adopters will help us improve and deliver our promise of Point.Click.Blockchain. with ARK’s technology stack.

To understand the customer-centric approach we want to move from application centric approach, that provides tools in the form of application interface to the application, to the more customer-centric approach. Where our technology users (developers, startups, enterprises) will use the basic application centric approach and provide additional value to their customers, via specialized APIs, plugins, tools and applications built on top of ARK’s ever-evolving APIs — thus deliver true value to end-users — your customers.