This week I've been playing around a bit with this working Ark protocol on Signet. It wasn't a deep dive down the Ark rabbit hole, just some superficial observations. There are still a few things to be decided on like the refresh period and the fees, but I thought it gives us a taste of what using an Ark will be like when it's live.
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They have a nice guide with a straight forward walk through the installation, creating a wallet, getting some signet sats, boarding the Ark, paying a lightning invoice and then going back onchain. It's all in command line so I ended up having a few issues... I've had some experience with using Phoenixd so it wasn't completely new. I think it was that some of the terms like "board" and "offboard" took some getting used to, as the commands change depending whether your sats are offline or onchain. I'm sure having a GUI with visuals on where your sats sit will dissolve this issue. Boarding along with a refresh allowed offchain sats to be instantly spendable via lightning which was cool! Off-boarding or sending to an onchain address required a wait for some block confirmations.
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Receiving and sending LN payments through Ark without an upper limit (like a LN channel) sounds appealing. If they manage to get a large user base it could be a large gain in privacy. Transacting within the Ark between people and businesses could be very cheap and instant. I wonder if this might be a great wallet for NWC...?
I keep thinking that it feels similar to using Liquid as a resting asset and lightning to send or receive with a swap service like Boltz. I have not used Aqua but this is something that they automate. They're different in structure but might have a similar feel.
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The fees to offboard and to refresh will be interesting to see. Will this be something bitcoiners don't mind paying for? If the cost is too high or the time interval too short, I don't think it will get much interest. Unless of course there's another benefit to using Ark that I haven't yet heard.
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This is what I'd like to research some more:
- The custody trade-offs and the unilateral exit.
- What happens to the UTXO's under an ASP management? (consolidate?)
- How do they pay out the LN invoice? (Do they also run a LN node?)
- Why do they need to charge for the refresh?
- How some of these OP codes improve ARK.
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Has anyone else on SN tested this out?