Blockchain Technology: Leaving the Hype Behind and Climbing the Slope of Enlightenment in 2019
In the previous post about Dynamic Fee marketplaces I promised to deliver monthly blogs on ARK and blockchain development, so here we go with my first 2019 blog post.
First things first:
🎆 Wishing you a Happy New Year — to a prosperous year of 2019.
We appreciate taking the journey with us!
Abstract:
In this post we will talk about the hype coming to an end and what are the next logical steps for all blockchain projects that want to follow the path of mass adoption, reaching plateau of productivity. We will shortly present what our activity after ARK Core v2 launch was and what is the current state of our promise related to automation and interoperability challenges in blockchain space.
The Blockchain’s Technology Road Ahead
After all the hype in 2017, the year 2018 was a realistic check for many of the crypto-currency projects — it’s was a hard rocky downhill road, but this was to be expected as with any of the new emerging technologies on their path to mass adoption.
It’s hard to predict what the future will bring, but one thing is for sure, the technology is here to stay. As it moves from the rocky roads decline, through the trough of disillusionment (we are here) and starts to climb the slope of enlightenment, finally reaching the plateau of productivity (Figure 1).
A lot of predictions were already made, some of the recent ones prove that the technology is maturing, as most of the mentioned experts talk about benefits of the technology and not about the price/trading.
Personally I think this is the best way to move forward, deliver easy-to-use technology that will enable new use-cases and disrupt the existing ones. The key challenge here is to provide the tools and technology that makes this an easy switch — and this is where ARK’s main vision and motivation comes from.
Public vs Private Blockchains
The ongoing battle between proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work is slowly turning into the proof-of-stake benefit, especially looking at private chains and their requirements. Our flexible delegated-proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, that drastically reduces blockchain running costs and enables enterprises to run their secure private network with delegates as authorities of the network at blazing speeds with minimum resource usage.
You can read more about delegated-proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms here: https://docs.ark.io/introduction/blockchain/understanding-consensus-models.html#understanding-consensus-models.
Why Am I Mentioning This?
As you probably read in our roadmap for this year — related to the Core Blockchain: “We will continue improving and implementing new features with input from the community and wider audiences”. Working together by listening and understanding our early-adopters will help us improve and deliver our promise of Point.Click.Blockchain. with ARK’s technology stack.
To understand the customer-centric approach we want to move from application centric approach, that provides tools in the form of application interface to the application, to the more customer-centric approach. Where our technology users (developers, startups, enterprises) will use the basic application centric approach and provide additional value to their customers, via specialized APIs, plugins, tools and applications built on top of ARK’s ever-evolving APIs — thus deliver true value to end-users — your customers.
The value-centric proposition is not the same as the API-centric, which is a technical solution. More precisely, the value proposition describes what value you offer to the customer and why the customer should buy it. The API describes how you provide value to the customer.[source: value-proposition-canvas]
The value-centric approach is important for organisations already running their business, that want to improve their product offerings, or add new features/products enabled by blockchain technology (where ARK’s technology comes into play).
We will focus on this aspect and help businesses improve their technology by adding new value propositions or solving some of their existing customers pains — which have been made possible now with blockchain technology, especially with ARK’s technology stack.
ARK Core v2 Post Launch Activities
A lot has happened in the last month, we have patched several critical bugs and security vulnerabilities related to recent launch of ARK Core v2. The impact and explanation of critical bugs and security vulnerabilities will be explained in a separate blog post.
All this was made possible by our great community and we couldn’t be more grateful and thankful to have you all. Thank you for testing, analyzing, contributing and delivering the critical voice we all need to listen to sometimes.
Some of the contributions can be found in our last GitHub bounty posts for December, where you can also see the extensive activity of our project, either from community or on our GitHub repository.
With the release of ARK Core v2 we added many new ways for users and developers to communicate with our blockchain nodes. To support this, a new documentation website was launched a while ago, before the final release of v2 — https://docs.ark.io. In the last month we realized that documentation was not optimal, so we immediately started to work on the improvements, such as straight forward TL;DR examples, restructured content, new sections for the SDKs and Exchanges, so yes — we are listening and delivering.
As promised our core-roadmap plan was synced to Github repositories. Now you will be able to follow the tasks and their progress more closely. Each of the Core sub-projects contains tasks and functionalities related to the next version number release. All this can also be tracked via milestones: https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/core/milestones.
Ark Improvement Proposals — AIPs are getting more activity lately. We had several new contributions and process feedback from the community. The AIP application process is getting a fresh overhaul, meaning we will have even clearer and more coherent steps for submitting new Ark Improvement Proposals, following the new process guidance rules.
What About New Features — Delivering the Promise of Automation and Interoperability
Virtual machines and smart contracts technology are maturing, growing up. Recently a lot of new projects are introducing their own virtual machines or are starting to use web-assembly language as a base on top of which new smart-contract functionality can be developed. We are aware of these advances and are doing our own internal assessment in which direction we will move forward, either with a fork of the existing virtual machine, or a stronger integration into the Core itself. We are also looking at Bitcoin Script as an automation engine possibility, that could be used to deliver the promise of trustless swaps and push ARK’s technology higher in the top interoperability blockchain list. Swap protocol will be defined — firstly related to ARK-chains, so any ARK-chain will be able to process trustless-swaps with another ARK-based chain. Next logical step will be cross-chain swaps, where bridge-plugins will enable swaps between different chain protocols.
Final decisions on what we will use and which aspect fits best into the ARK Core will be made in Q1 2019.
Promise.all {
A lot of challenges await us in 2019, and what are challenges for — if not to be overcome and conquered. Thank you for giving us the chance to serve your business/project/application as a technology provider.
{ We promise we will deliver, so you can deliver yours 💪 }
}
Again, wishing you a Happy and Prosperous 2019 🎆
