Toot
that hórn.
The 4-conference Arké road show is a wrap. Just got back from BTC Prague yesterday and now it’s back to the desk. It was a very intense and good time. Shout-out to the many people I met and had a chance to talk to, old friends and new acquaintances.
Bark is now public on mainnet, which also allows for Arké to be usable with real bitcoin. It’s only been 5-6 days, so it’s still super early. Launching during BTC Prague was great in that I could test payments at food stands and beer taps, and directly show it to people and get feedback.
Super early days also means that things can go wrong. What I hear from Second is that the launch went great on their side and no customer funds were lost. Optimizations based on observing real usage, along with a security update, were already made. My initial payment for a burger at a food truck didn’t work due to an issue on how amount parsing was handled with LNURL, which I fixed right away and then things worked smoothly. A really good launch overall I’d say.
A few links:
Bark now on bitcoin mainnet (Second blog)
Introducing Noah and Arké: Two new Bark-based wallets (Second blog)
Second Launches Bark on Bitcoin Mainnet, Targeting Self-Custody UX Gap (Bitcoin Magazine)
And quotes:
It’s completely different than any Bitcoin wallet I’ve ever used before. — Matt Odell
Arké really is an experience. It’s like a wallet from 2042. Never seen anything like it. — grubles (works at Second)
arké is the UX standard… — janusz
… the UX is superb. Design and the attention to details are 💯 — Luca (works at Second)
… the features are very cool including that turn the phone around for the QR code on iOS :) ill be sharing it around — jimSBr
This is genius. If you rotate your phone, it shows a QR code for others to scan! — Carlos (works at Second)
… Arke’s s intro video upon wallet creation is outstanding. — Davide
And observations:
People love the intro videos and actually watch them. The video format was an off-the-cuff experiment that I really wasn’t sure about at all. Good to take creative risks sometimes. I created them after having designed the usual static intro screens, Michael telling me that it looks nice but he won’t read them, and me agreeing that I also wouldn’t. Short videos are the format of this moment in time. Someone said I should create more videos to explain features (like the unilateral exit) - good idea.
The tilt-to-share feature is a real wow effect. It is unexpected, surprising, and still instantly intuitive so people wonder why sharing your QR hasn’t been like that all along. Several people told me they want to implement it in their apps (and Linky already has, see above).
The nearby device detection and sharing however only works 2% of the time. I am relying on Apple frameworks for this, the Internet tells me they pretty bit flaky, so I am not sure this can be made as solid as it needs to be. Maybe a Bitchat-like approach could work?
The visual design is an instant differentiator.
Some people appreciate the smoothness that comes with a native Swift app, others are unhappy about the lack of Android support. I don’t think I could have built Arké with a cross-platform approach, so I think it was still the right decision. And there’s always Noah.
Everyone seems cool with the lack of technical lingo in the app.
Hallmarks spark interest. Still don’t think it’s 100% proven that we really need it, and there’s a lot of detail to figure out. Let’s figure it out.
Getting payment speed to around 2 seconds will be super important. I hung out for ~3 hours at the beer taps, observed people playing (90% use Phoenix), and chatted up some of them. I think a lot of this will be up to Second to optimize their lightning node connectivity.
I still have a lot of work to do getting the app startup to be smoother, handling payment meta data, refining unilateral exit, migration and multi-device handling, send all fee calculation, error messages, etc. The next weeks will be about stability, reliability and interoperability.
The community really embraces bark. I learned a lot about its potential to improve lightning channel management, there are experiments in mashing it up with Cashu for proof-of-reserve systems, and lots more. Awesome to see the great reception and huge shout-out to the Second team.
Bitcoin payments infrastructure has matured a lot, but the demand side is not clear. Who will make all those payments? For which use cases? In what part of the world, etc? I spoke with a lot of people, and no one had good answers or done thorough research. If you do, please let me know.
No doubt, this is the most self-promotional post I have ever written on this blog. If there had been any serious negative events or comments, I would have included them, but there just haven’t been. But maybe those will come, and then I can write another post.
I still have a lot of notes to go through and organize from the conference tour, so I can plan out the next weeks. Generally, the first half of the year was about focused building, and the second half will be more outward looking. More to come on that.
Did you try Arké? You can get it on the website. If you give it a whirl, let me know what you make of it.
And big thanks to all the conference organizers out there for bringing everyone together.
✌️🇺🇦