Project Update: Ark (ARK) the All-in-One Blockchain Solutions Basics Ark aims to bridge the gap between all the different blockchains out there essentially connecting all of them together. They created and will use SmartBridge which is a technology that allows blockchains to connect and communicate with one another. Once a blockchain connects to Ark’s system either via a code snippet or encoded listener, they are set up and connected to the Ark SmartBridge system. Essentially it is an ecosystem meant for cryptocurrency mass adoption. Tokens and usage Fees on the Ark blockchain must be paid in Ark meaning the entire ecosystem will be running using the Ark token. Since the Ark blockchain and the SmartBridge technology is meant to be used as a "highway" to transmit messages between different blockchains, the demand for Ark coins will increase as more blockchains join the Ark Ecosystem. Ark software stack aims to make it easy to launch and customize blockchains. Developers get access to Ark's ecosystem of plugins to customize their network, mobile and desktop wallets and an explorer. Ark is one of the projects that can generate income through holding since it allows to stake the tokens through the delegated proof of stake. Recent News The team is very busy with recruiting new team members and expanding the team even though size-wise the team decreased since the initial project release. Some of the members of the team were involved with Lisk before. Middle of August ARK Core v2 Devnet was released with the aim of fixing any final bugs in the codebase before ARK Core V2 hard fork. Overall there are plenty of updates to the project that also include wallets for example. There is also plenty of Github activity when compared to similar projects. They have announced partnership with Blockchain HR Marketplace Hiway.io but there isn't much usage of the Ark blockchain. Roadmap The roadmap on the website is very detailed and even shows different task progression. The biggest upcoming developments are ARK CORE v2, better technical implementation and alternative development implementation/ programming languages. This will mean that the developers will be able to use multiple programming. languages when developing for Ark. Long term developments include The ARK Virtual Machine integration, Push Button Deployable Blockchains and Integration of Inter-planetary File System (IPFS). Availability and price ARK is listed on several exchanges with: Binance (54% of volume) Upbit (23%) Bittrex (19%) OKEx (3%) also on LiteBit.eu, Cryptopia, COSS and Bit-Z Current price as of 28th of September is around $0.89 with ARK being ranked on 71th place in terms of the market capitalisation and market cap of $94M Around 105M out of 136M of the tokens is in the circulation meaning 23% of tokens will be added to the circulation. ARK has been doing quite poorly this year. If you bought in early 2017 you have probably made profit when compared to fiat/BTC but the performance was been poor this year even thought there was a nice pump in April/May. How is it doing? The development is going well and Ark was a first 'blockchain bridge' project for a while but now there is some competition (the likes of Polkadot, Aelf or Interledger) Since Ark is not only connecting blockchains but also allows users to deploy their own blockchain it competes with the likes of Ethereum or Neo too. The problem is that Ark is very ambitions and maybe even too big in terms of scale since it also has different use cases on top of that. It will take a lot of development power and partnerships to make Ark widely adopted but if you believe in the use case then it's one of the best projects of it's kind.