ARK Monthly Newsletter — September 2019 Edition

Justin Renken

Follow

Published in

ARK.io | Blog

6 min readOct 5, 2019

--

September is in the box! This blog post will cover last month's highlights, activities, achievements, and unique content. Let’s take a look at what the team has been up to.

SEPTEMBER REMARKS

“September has been a great month for ARK development and achievements. Core v2.6, arguably the largest Core update so far, ended its development cycle during September and will be moving into a devnet release and testing cycle soon. ARK was also integrated into Atomic Wallet, giving users even more storage and swap options. Additionally, ARK is now available on Cryptocurrency Checkout, and users can use the service to purchase items from the ARK.io merch store and test out the integration. A key metric that interests me is the ARK.io Alexa ranking, which is currently in its fourth straight month of improvement and has more than halved since the new website launch in July. ARK is also looking to expand personnel even further in the development and marketing departments.”
Justin Renken, ARK.io Senior Brand Manager

SEPTEMBER’S TOP TWEET

SEPTEMBER ARK TIMELINE

ArkTimeline.com is a community resource built and maintained by the ARK Community Committee. The entire history of all ARK achievements and accomplishments are available there, and they are both sortable and filterable. Here’s a quick rundown for this past month:

SEPTEMBER ADVENTURES

This month, as suggested by ARK community member ‘Supercool,’ I traveled to Indianapolis, IN to catch the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race featuring the ARK32 driven by Corey Lajoie. If you missed it, check it out below:

ARK Adventures: ARK32 NASCAR at the Brickyard 400 Indianapolis, IN

SEPTEMBER FRANCE ACTIVITIES

ARK.io is incorporated as an SCIC in France, giving ARK a leg up when interfacing with the legacy financial system. This SCIC is the first of its kind for crypto in France.

On September 2nd, ARK CEO Francois Thoorens had a two-hour interview with Thierry PIGOT, journalist of the newspaper “J’automatise”. It is a bimonthly magazine, dealing with automation, industrial control systems, robots and all the technologies that allow industrial production to fully enter the digital age.

ARK CEO Francois Thoorens at the Elysee Palace on September 17th.

On September 17th, Francois Thoorens went to the Elysee Palace (official residence of the President) for a reception as part of the launch of France Digitale Day. France Digitale has been dubbed by some of the French media to be the “Davos for Startups.” During this event, French President Emmanuel MACRON announced in his speech that his government has convinced institutional investors to invest more heavily in late-stage VC funds and asset managers. Institutional investors have committed to investing $5.5 billion (€5 billion).

SEPTEMBER POWERED BY ARK UPDATE

The Powered by ARK Program aims to help recognize, support and collaborate with projects building on ARK’s technology. The first accepted official partner is nOS, the virtual operating system for the Smart Economy. Here’s a brief update and remarks from ARK Strategic Partnerships Manager Ray Alvarez:

“As the saying goes, there are no shortcuts to any place worth going. The team at nOS knows this and it shows in their constant progress as they hit milestone after milestone. Since joining the Powered by ARK Program on July 30th, The teams at nOS and ARK have fostered a collaborative relationship which is accelerating the pace at which nOS is achieving their goals.
September 30th marked another huge milestone for the team at nOS as they released their testnet, alpha blockchain, and block explorer. Not only does everything look sleek, but there is also a solid codebase which will serve as a strong foundation upon which the nOS project will be built. Currently, the testnet has features such as Staking NOS, Stake-powered voting for delegates, block rewards, a unique transaction fee model, and the block explorer.
We couldn’t be happier for the team at nOS and the progress they are making building their blockchain on ARK.”
Ray Alvarez, ARK Strategic Partnerships Manager

You can track nOS’s progress via their blog by clicking here.

SEPTEMBER AMAs

Ask-Me-Anythings were conducted during this month featuring ARK team members answering questions by the community on Slack.ARK.io. Here’s the list:

Follow ARK on Twitter for invitations to join future AMAs.

SEPTEMBER DEVELOPER ROUNDTABLE

The ARK Developer Roundtable is a monthly video call, conducted by ARK.io Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Kristjan Košič. These calls allow a unique opportunity to present information to the community and gain valuable insight from community developers. Here’s last month’s meeting:

ARK Developer Roundtable September 26, 2019

Follow ARK on Twitter for invitations to join future roundtables.

SEPTEMBER DEVELOPMENT REPORT

The ARK Monthly Development Report covers all pull requests (opened, closed, merged) as well as all issues opened and closed in every ARK Ecosystem public repository, the number of contributors during that month, the number of new stargazers, and total lines of GitHub code added or deleted (check September’s report here).

SEPTEMBER NETWORK REPORT

This network report summarizes network activity on the ARK Public Network for the recent month.

Transactions

Total: 159,533
Avg per block: 0.4925
Per type:
Transfers: 158,738 (99.50%)
Second Signatures: 3 (0.00%)
Votes: 788 (0.49%)
Delegate Registrations: 4 (0.00%)

1,516 unique wallets sent an outgoing transaction.

Blocks

Full: 683 (0.21%)
Empty: 315,314 (97.35%)
Non-empty: 7,898 (2.44%)
Total: 323,895
Missed: 105

Fees

Total: 3286.65717614 Ѧ
Per type:
Transfers: 2982.78701589 Ѧ
Second Signatures: 5.64312978 Ѧ
Votes: 270.09682213 Ѧ
Delegate Registrations: 28.13020834 Ѧ

Votes

Voting Wallets: 41,692
Voting Wallets > 1 ARK : 18,977
Total ARK Voting: 83472179.28683481 Ѧ

SEPTEMBER PODCASTS

The ARK Crypto Podcast releases weekly episodes all about ARK, featuring interviews, monologues, tutorials, reports, presentations, and more. The show aims for a 30-minute runtime and releases new episodes every Friday. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, Castbox, and more. Check out the episodes released this month:

ARK Crypto Podcast #051 — Reasons to be Excited for ARK in the Near Term

ARK Crypto Podcast #52 — ARK Crypto Podcast Celebrates One Year Of Episodes

The podcast will return after some upgrades and content refactors.

WHAT’S NEXT

The following month for ARK will focus on deploying Core v2.6 onto the ARK Devnet and initiate final testing phases. This is arguably the biggest Core iteration to date, and it will contain big functionality additions for developers. Check Roadmap.ARK.io for status updates. During this month, we will also be working with our recently selected group of ARK Advocates and start them on the training process for representing ARK at local events in their area. The ARK Subreddit will also get some upgrades that will enhance the community, and the end of the month features a large annual conference that ARK will attend.

FEEDBACK SURVEY

Take a short three-minute feedback survey so we can learn more about your opinions on how we’re doing. We review and track this feedback and use it to further improve our efforts.

Take the three-minute feedback survey here.

GET INVOLVED

Here’s a quick list of what your first steps might be to get involved with ARK:

Join our community on Slack or Reddit
Launch an ARK community service
Contribute code and earn ARK
Launch an ARK node and campaign for forging status
Create a blockchain in three simple steps

Looking forward to October!

Read our new 2019 whitepaper, follow us on social media (Twitter|Facebook | Reddit ), join our community ( Slack | Discord ) and stay tuned to our blog on Medium and on Steemit.