You can use Ark in the wild
I saw a post on nostr about Arkade launching their live beta, and decided to try it out.
Arkade is one of the several Ark implementations currently under development. In the past there have been a few mainnet tests of Ark, but I don't think any of these implementations have released a live mainnet beta until today (Second released a signet version in March, but I don't believe they have a publicly available mainnet version).
Creating a wallet
When you go to arkade.money, you are shown a few brief screens that say things about Bitcoin entering a "new dimension" and Ark being "your gateway to a new generation of applications -- all secured by Bitcoin!" Then they prompt you to install the PWA on your home screen.
The next step is to create a wallet.
This only took a second and then I got a familiar screen that looked like pretty much every other wallet I've used:
send
, receive
, balance
, and transaction history
.Sending sats to Lightning to Arkade
I decided I would start with my standard micropayments test: how easy is it to send 10 sats into the wallet?
First thing I noticed is that when setting up an invoice to receive is that any amount over 332 sats triggered a little tooltip:
Below this amount displays no tooltip at all. Once I generated the invoice, the wallet displayed a QR, but when I tried to scan the QR with a lightning wallet, the lightning wallet produced an error. It turns out that Arkade was generating an ark invoice and none of my lightning wallets could pay it.
This makes sense, if you think about it: an onchain wallet won't recognize a lightning QR as they are separate networks. Just like sats can't just be sent from an onchain wallet to a lightning wallet, you can't send lightning sats to an ark wallet...unless there is a gateway of some sort.
Arkade must have a gateway because I was able to send 350 sats into my Arkade wallet from a lightning wallet I was using. It deducted a 1 sat fee -- although I'm not sure whether this was the routing fee or a fee from whoever was running the gateway.
Sending sats from Arkade to Lightning
Next I decided to see if I could send sats out of the wallet. I created a 10 sat invoice in my lightning wallet and then clicked send in Arkade. I pasted the invoice into the field here and clicked continue. It produced this error:
It seems like Arkade is trying to use a Boltz swap to send my 10 sats and likely this is uneconomical, and so it produces an error. I increased the amount to 333 sats and was able to successfully make the transaction.
Sending sats inside Ark
Finally, I noticed when I generated a QR for receiving that it showed an ark address. So, I decided to create a second Arkade wallet and see if it could receive a small amount of sats from my first Arkade wallet.
This worked beautifully. Very fast and no errors to send 10 sats from my first Arkade wallet to the second.
Arkade Apps
At the bottom of the screen on my Arkade wallet there are a couple of buttons, one of which is
Apps
. I clicked this and it showed me this:It seems like they plan on introducing a few things to use your Ark sats with so that you don't have to just spend all your time getting them in and out of Ark.
Dust, VUTXOs and where my sats are hanging out
Finally, I checked out the
Settings
area. Clicking About
showed me this screen:I noticed that under the line
Dust
it says "330 sats". This surprises me because my balance is only 155 sats. 330 is close to the amount (334 sats) I sent to my lightning wallet as a test.Also confusing to me is where these 155 sats actually are. I doubt that I could unilaterally exit to the chain with 155 sats.
When i clicked on Settings > Advanced > Coin Control I got this screen:
It makes me think Arkade has some solution for holding dust amounts.
Conclusion
I'm intrigued by Ark. It sounds complex, but not necessarily more so than Lightning. Ark does solve the onboarding problem that is present in LIghtning. An Ark user can receive from another Ark user without setting up channels or anything fiddly like that. I'm not really clear how self-sovereign this receiving is for amounts under the dust limit, though.
I'm looking forward to learning more about it.