Another month is in the books and October came and went in a hurry. On paper this last month wasn’t as overtly busy with hirings, major updates or new partnerships, but October was a critical month for the development team. In October, their focus was on working with the community to patch some lingering issues in V1 and putting the final touches on V2. As of the end of October, a final release candidate for ARK Core V2 is now in testing on our public devnet. Stay tuned for an announcement on the official launch date.

With that, let’s recap!

DEVELOPMENT

In October, the dev team made their final push to get the release candidate of ARK Core V2 ready for public testing. We pushed one major development update this month and it was a doozy. It contained updates to the snapshotting system, the new transaction pool improvements, sorting transactions in the pool by fees (to allow higher fee transactions to be accepted first), changes to bignum, improved HDWallet, a lot of refactoring, improvements to round ordering and other significant changes that helped to finalize the release candidate for Core V2.

After the major update, we announced the ARK Core V2 Testathon, with additional bounties to encourage one final week of testing before we announce the release date. Barring any last minute critical bugs, everything is looking good up to this point.

We also announced the addition of our C++ SDK bringing our total number of supported languages to 17.

October wasn’t all positive however, as the team and community spent an extended period dealing with a network outage issue due to an expected generator error being caused by issues with round ordering and database corruption. You can read more in the post mortem on Reddit.

Finally, we posted a thorough update outlining how dynamic fees work on the network to help with those who still had some confusion on the specifics of the system.

HIRING / TEAM

We have rounded out our team quite extensively in the past several months and are happy with our current situation. We have already seen great contributions from our recent hires and they are fitting in nicely with the team.

We have also focused on several changes to the structure of our management team. As many of you know, from the beginning, ARK did not formally select or promote any one team member as being the “CEO of ARK”. There were many reasons for this, some of which were noble. What we have learned after two years of doing business in this manner, is that this working model also brought with it many challenges. One of my roles as Chief Strategist at ARK is to evaluate and provide feedback on where we can improve our business operations and become more efficient as a team. After careful review, we have decided it was time to make the first core changes to our management team.

Effective immediately, François-Xavier Thoorens will now hold the title of President & CEO of ARK ECOSYSTEM (SCIC). With this re-alignment, Kristjan Košič will step into the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role to take his place and help steer the technological vision for ARK and ensure we stay at the top of the industry in the years ahead. While these are the first changes we have made and are ready to announce, they most likely will not be the last. We are aware that in the past our business structure has not always been clear to the community and we will be updating the team page on the website to not only reflect these recent changes, but also to provide a better overview of the structure of the team as a whole.

PARTNERSHIPS

There were no new partnerships announced in the month of October. We are continuing to work with Major League Hacking (MLH) to build out the ARK workshop which will be a featured workshop heading into next year at their hackathon events all over the world.

MARAchain also announced on Twitter that they would be one of the first companies implementing Core V2, once launched, to help improve the blockchain layer of their decentralized application. We can’t wait to see what they put together!

OUTREACH & EVENTS

October officially began our policy of “Unleash the Justin”, referring to ARK’s own Justin Renken. As a part of our communication team, we are working hard to leverage his charisma and enthusiasm for ARK to help spread the word. We hope you like his style because you will be seeing a lot of Justin moving forward.

Blockchain NW

The month started with his first major presentation on behalf of ARK at Blockchain NW in Seattle. There, Justin presented on the Mass Adoption of crypto and how ARK is positioning itself to help push the industry forward.

Here are some images to go with the video: