✌️ down

✌️ to go.

As mentioned in my previous post, it is conference time. The first two were already super interesting. Congrats to the organizers for bringing together so many good people, and thanks everyone for the conversations. Also got to sync with the Second team and do a bunch of testing and iteration on Arké. Mainnet is imminent, so it’s time to shine. Check out the video Matthew made for Arké.

The receive view looks completely different now. It’s now a more straightforward flow of entering an amount and getting a QR code (with a lightning invoice as well as ark and onchain addresses). The previous iteration laid out all the available options, but that turned out to be not so smooth in action.

When you see the QR code, you can also tilt your phone forward to see a simplified version that is slightly tuned for the presumed payer in front of you. And you can tap the QR code to see a simpler QR code that uses the lightning: prefix, which some wallets seem to prefer. Everyone loves the tilt so far.

I had this flow originally added to the tilt view, as an experiment. But then it was just smoother and it was obvious it should become the main receive flow.

After some conversations with Erik, who is working on the NumoPay point-of-sale project, I also added NFC support to the send screen. So now there are two ways to exchange payment info over the air.

And after more testing with Cake Wallet, Wallet of Satoshi, Phoenix, Lexe, Blixt, BitKit, Aqua, Muun and more, I also added LNURL support and a fine-tuned the handling of the many different ways all these projects present payment info in their QR codes. There is probably more tuning to do, and probably some conversations to be had around standardizing.

Not sure if I mentioned it, but the force move (aka emergency exit) now relies on live activities and local notifications to keep the user informed. Great thing here is that there’s truly no custom server component for this feature now (esplora still needed of course to broadcast transactions and get block data, but this is interchangeable).

An interesting feature that was brought up in a conversation at a conference was that of payment and payer proofs (specifically around BOLT12). How can I as a payer quickly briefly provide info that shows that the payment was made, and that I made it? And how can the recipient validate that easily? I think there is a nice solution there, possibly using Hallmarks, but have not had time to put my thoughts together other than creating an issue. A feature I’ll also explore in Arké soon, and then propose it to the guide.

Also, I am not interested in adding more features at the moment otherwise. There is plenty of refinement to do, and real usage on mainnet, combined with user feedback, will surely bring up many more shortcomings. Overall I am happy though. Already heard from a couple of people that they want to steal some of the UX aspects of Arké for their own wallet projects, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

Always strikes me how great everyone is in person at conferences and events. You might not think that’s the case from some of the things you see online in the larger social media ecosystem. Let’s keep it real then.

Now on to the next conference.

✌️🇺🇦