Optimizing Bitcoin for Medium of Exchange

“Payments are the north star. Bitcoin is money, so payments need to work.”

The Ark protocol is widely considered one of the most promising Layer-2 architectures in Bitcoin today—one of maybe two or three that are 'Maxi-approved' due to its unique (and rare) permissionless exit feature.

Former Blockchain engineer Steven Roose (& CEO of Ark implementation 2ndbtc has been working on Ark since nearly day one, after connecting with Ark's somewhat infamous creator, Burak, while working on Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain in 2022.

What began as an early company pushing the new protocol forward eventually evolved into two distinct implementations— 2ndbtc and Ark Labs—with notable cultural and technical differences between the projects.

In this episode of Bitcoin Rails, Steven and I got a chance to discuss the full history and evolution of this new leading protocol, including:

- How Ark was largely inspired by inefficiencies in Lightning (and how Lightning and Ark may complement one another today)

- How the Ark project, initially led by Burak, bifurcated into two distinct implementations (2ndbtc and Arkade), and the differences between them

- How the protocol has evolved to avoid dependence on soft forks (and how CTV activation could fix the biggest UX challenge in Ark’s current design)

- Steven’s personal insights working with Blockstream on Liquid and why Bitcoin sidechains have historically struggled to gain adoption

This episode is fairly technical, covering quite a bit of inside baseball on the early origins of the Ark protocol. I'll be hosting Alex Berge on the show's season finale next week for a more in-depth look at Arkade - and to balance the playing field. Stay tuned for Ark-mania on Bitcoin Rails.

This episode of Bitcoin Rails is powered by:

- Best In Slot — the leading API for Ordinals and BRC-20 data aggregation and indexing.

- Spark — a statechains implementation advancing Bitcoin-powered payments.

- Citrea — the leading Bitcoin rollup technology and BitVM alliance contributor.

📌 Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:06 Background on Ark Founders and Liquid

02:29 Liquid and Its Challenges

06:19 Why Liquid Didn’t Take Off

11:28 The Birth of Ark and Its Innovations

13:57 Original Ideas Behind Ark

17:27 Ark Technical TLDR

31:29 UX and the Future of Ark

36:55 The Hacker House That Started Ark for Steven

42:17 An Unexpected Crisis

46:12 Second: A New Beginning For Ark

59:05 Programmability vs Payments in Ark