What is 1 Ark? Ark is a blockchain project that improves the DPoS systems of Lisk, Crypti, and Bitshares. Ark offers innovative blockchain technology to users, developers and startups.
1.2 Objectives Ark aims to establish a complete blockchain ecosystem with a high degree of flexibility, adaptability and extensibility.
How does 2 Ark work? 2.1 DPOS Consensus Mechanism The consistency algorithm used by Ark was originally introduced by BitShares to eliminate POW-related drawbacks, such as centralization of mining capacity and waste of resources. In ArkS DPoS, there are 51 blacksmiths representing the “mining” of new tokens. These 51 delegates are voted by ARK holders in exchange for their votes and represent a share of the ARK they hold. Since inflation is lower than Lisk and Ethereum, this gives Ark token holders a greater incentive to continue investing in the network. “The 51 forged nodes with the highest number of votes are eligible to forge the Ark block. This design eliminates the possibility of any single large Ark holder or organization holding a large number of ArKs gaining control of the entire network by voting all nodes to forge locations, effectively taking full control of the DPoS blockchain. Votes for Ark Tokens held by Ark Crew may be used at Ark Crew’s sole discretion. (ARK WP). DPOS also relies on relay nodes, which, while not spurious, help add extra security to the network. Anyone can follow the instructions on the Ark website to become a representative or relay node.
2.2 Smart Bridge,
Ark Smart Bridge is a mechanism that can provide any blockchain with the ability to communicate with each other. By implementing a small piece of code into the core of other blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, they are now connected to Ark. This enables the user to prompt the command through the Ark wallet and have it executed on any compatible blockchain.
Example 1: If you want to trigger an ETH Smart contract but using Ark, you can send commands directly through Ark Smart Bridge to trigger events directly in the wallet. Code embedded in the ETH chain is always listening for ark Smart Bridge transactions and will collect this information and trigger functions to sign contracts. Example 2: You want to issue record entries in Factom, but you only hold arKs. Therefore, you can access your ARK wallet and enter the correct information and instructions for the FCT chain via the Smart Bridge TAB. And then send it. That’s it, now the FCT link receives the information and takes appropriate action. Example 3: I want to send 10 ArKs to my ETH wallet. This will require encoding listeners with back-end capabilities to exchange currency. Once I send 10 ArKs to my ETH wallet, the encoded listener treats this TX (transaction) as an exchange function and acts accordingly. The encoded listener automatically picks up this TX and needs to transform, so it acts as a relay node, receives the TX, transforms it, and re-broadcasts the TX on its way to the ETH wallet. Encoded listeners collect a small fee for processing TX. (bit. Ly / 2 k3oauz). As you can see, by making all blockchains cross-compatible, the opportunities are endless. I doubt whether this is necessary, as it is a centralised solution for a world eager to decentralise everything. The only way to use Smart Bridge technology is to use it through the Ark blockchain, rather than rejecting the whole blockchain idea in the first place. Teams like Komodo are doing atomic swapping, and it’s interesting to see other use cases for Smart Bridge. Smart Bridge is an important mechanism of Ark. They are working on some other projects like mobile wallet, Ark CORE V2, deployable blockchain and a few other things that can be found here. Personally, I don’t see much of Ark’s capabilities outside of Smart Bridge, so it will be interesting to see how they evolve into the cryptocurrency scene.
The Ark team is very large, and some of the team members are former Lisk developers. The site lists 24 people, but not everyone works full-time on the ARK project. To determine if this is the case,
3.1 Core People Let’s take a look at the two core people of the team: Mike Doty and Francois-Xavier Thoorens. Doty has years of experience creating blockchain technology projects and is one of the driving forces behind Bitseed. He also holds several engineering degrees from Caltech and is a Certified Quality Engineer (CQE) and certified Reliability Engineer (CRE). Thoorens was involved in an EU project focused on technology used to search the ocean for unidentified Marine objects (SUMO – as opposed to Ufos) as well as technology developed by LISK and several other companies such as Ventura and DonatioCare. Given their past experience, they probably know not only technical details, but also team organization, communications, industry resources, etc.
The Ark company’s linkedin link is as follows, and a total of 10 employees are listed among them. www.linkedin.com/company/ark…
Ark also has partners such as switching/encryption ecosystems coss. IO and Ledger. Their integration with the Ledger hardware Wallet makes them one of 13 currencies that can be stored using the Ledger hardware Wallet itself (the others are Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Komodo, Litecoin, PoSW, Ripple, Stratis & Zcash). The partnership with Coss.io makes sense, as CoSS and Ark seem to have similar goals to mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. However, Coss. IO appears to be more active in The Asian market.
4 Project Community The Ark community is amazing and has very open communication about other projects. The fact that the Ark team hosts AMA in Slack every week is certainly agnostic, and the community recognizes the importance of many projects working together to improve the industry. I think the community can be an important reason to invest, the higher the loyalty, the greater the chance of long-term holders, which makes the investment more reliable and secure, and those who believe in the long-term vision of the project will actively participate in the ecosystem.
5 token Ark distribution: 93.75 million (circulation) 187,500 seeded during the ICO to 30 founding members of ARK (most likely not circulation) 8.75 million to ARKShield (most likely not circulation) 2.5 million dollars for awards (circulation) 1.25 million trusteeship (estimated, increased to ARKShield, The inflation rate was 6.31 percent in the first year and 5.93 percent in the second. Nine years later, it will be 4.02%. At present, there are many platforms that support Ark transaction, as shown in the figure below, which can also be directly searched by MyToken.
Ark has listed the percentage of progress of its sub-projects on its official website. Among them, the key Smart Brige is only 10% progress, which is worrying. Code analysis is covered in the investment Advice section.
7 Investment Suggestions For mature projects that have been traded online for a certain period of time, I will judge their future price development from the perspectives of valuation, code, institution and token. Valuation Angle: refers to the overall valuation of ICO compared with the overall valuation of the current market price. When the overall valuation of the market price is higher than the overall valuation of the project ICO, the rational project side will consider using the raised funds to recover tokens in the market. The reason is very easy to understand. Even if 100% of the tokens distributed at the time of fundraising are recovered, the project side will still have surplus funds on hand (the token price at the time of fundraising > the price of the online descendant coins). Of course, this assumption is not always true, because the money raised has other uses. Code perspective: The code progress of a mature project is a direct indicator of whether the project is actually doing something. Of course, this perspective is not applicable to some non-open source projects, for which I will use another perspective. Institutional perspective: The investment institution behind the project is also crucial. The investment institution is mature and stable, will not crash due to market fluctuations, is rich in resources, can mobilize resources to help the development of the project, and the strategic significance of the project for large investment institutions, which is of great benefit to the project side. Token perspective: By observing the distribution of tokens, namely token concentration, the price sensitivity of the token to buying orders can be considered to a certain extent. In the face of the same number of buying orders, the higher the token concentration, the higher the relative price increase, and vice versa. Because the lower the token concentration, the greater the sell-off when the price rises. The above four dimensions can objectively evaluate the actual situation of a project to some extent, but the more core is the implementation and business planning of the project itself, which need to be obtained through direct communication and communication with the project side through various channels. Ark belongs to the cross-chain field. We also select similar Aion and WanChain in the cross-chain field. Comparing their recent price trends, WanChain has the largest price trend among the three, followed by Aion, and Ark has a weak price trend.
We took a look at Ark’s Github code base, and the most critical library Core (guaranteed Smart Bridge functionality) has been slow to update recently.
To sum up, Ark, as a project established nearly two years ago, “Atlas” is the name of Ark ICO. It was conducted from November 7, 2016 to December 11, 2016, and about 1,400-1,400 BTC was raised. The recent code update of Ark is not satisfactory. It is not listed on the official website of investment institutions, and there is no way to verify it through other channels. As an ambush target in a bear market, Ark may not be a good choice from a code update perspective.