• Migration to the new ARK Core v2 on Mainnet has been completed successfully.
• The milestone will open a new era of ARK development and will set the foundation for a more efficient and stable network.
• Core v2 will enable developers to create new modular features and customisations. Core v1 has also been deprecated.

ARK.io board member and co-founder, BoldNinja announced in a Medium post this week the successful completion of the Core v2 migration on Mainnet. ARK Core v2 will allow developers to create modular features as well as customisations.

Users are encouraged to download the new Wallet v2. The wallet will work with the new v2 mainnet and will enable users to utilise the new dynamic fees system alongside other quality of life enhancements.

Developed from Scratch

According to BoldNinja, the Core v2 codebase is wholly new and developed from scratch. And since it will serve as the backbone of their blockchain, they made sure it has gone through relentless testing and fine-tuning.

Ever since the development of the ARK genesis block, one of their goals has been to provide the scalability and accessibility for custom blockchains. Their modular construction and interoperability features creates the perfect ecosystem of interconnected plug-and-play chains.  

The primary objective for the development of Core v2 would be to create an architecture where nearly all aspects of the ARK code base can be extended, modified, or replaced easily and quickly.

This can be likened to building something using LEGO blocks. By simply adding or replacing LEGOs, you can create something that’s totally new. In the same manner, the approach will give blockchain developers maximum flexibility in terms of aligning the bridge chains that will reflect their organisational priorities.

Next for Ark

The ARK team is already working on some of the features they would want to incorporate in their next release—v2.1. Because v2 is more modular, some improvements and features will be released ahead of the final v2.1.

Some of the features one can look forward to include:

• Upgrade of transaction protocol (AIP 11) – will bring in new transaction types such as IPFS, timeblock, multipayments, and more.
• Upgrade the multisignature protocol (AIP 18) – proposed improvement will solve limitations of the current multisignature implementation. Integrating “Simple Schnorr Multi-Signatures” is also being considered.
• P2P API improvements – currently, web-sockets or a torrent based protocol are being considered. Either of the two is believed to significantly improve downloading of data and communication performance.
• Parallel block downloading – implementation of parallel or threaded downloads will boost performance and will likely cut sync time by several hours.
• Integrate profiling with New Relic – integrating New Relic will give a better understanding of which parts of the core need further improvement in terms of performance and speed.

Aside from working on Core, developers will be releasing ARK Pay in the next few weeks. As stated on the project’s official site:

“We’ll be releasing ARK Pay in the next few weeks, which will be a simple open-source library that will provide an easy to use merchant plugin to easily start accepting ARK as means of payment, with QR and ARK’s URI scheme support (meaning you can scan QR via mobile and it pre-populates fields so you just sign the transaction) and URI scheme for ARK Desktop wallet where you’ll be able to click on Pay with ARK and it will open send model in ARK Desktop Wallet so you’ll have to sign the TX — you will get confirmation on when the payment completes.”

They are also working on website v2 and whitepaper v2. Both are expected to be available by the first quarter of 2019. Other projects they are working on include the Ark Desktop wallet v2 and ARKVM. More information will be shared as soon as details are solidified.