Ark Labs is a private company founded in June 2024 by Marco Argentieri and Simone Giacomelli. The company’s CEO, Argentieri, has been working in the Bitcoin industry since he was 18 years old, focusing on making it easier for people to use Bitcoin as a currency. Ark Labs has developed the Bitcoin layer 2 Ark protocol, which aims to help scale Bitcoin by amortizing the cost of a single on-chain transaction across many off-chain swaps.
The protocol is designed for Bitcoin users who already operate Lightning nodes and is based on the idea that people don’t want to become experts in running Lightning nodes to make payments. Ark Labs acknowledges that there will be specialized people or enterprises that know how to handle liquidity, and this is what they call Ark servers.
Users can become liquidity providers for Ark servers in exchange for a small fee, which can help to introduce a Bitcoin interest rate. This can be beneficial for both liquidity providers and users, as it helps to scale Bitcoin while providing a small reward to those who provide the liquidity. Ark helps Bitcoin scale horizontally, as a UTXO can provide liquidity for an exponential number of transactions compared to the amount of funds in the UTXO.
This means that 100 BTC can provide liquidity for tens of thousands of virtual transactions. The protocol also retains most of the UTXO capability, which means that users can do 95% of the things they can do in Bitcoin right now on ARK, such as multisig and opening multiple channels with a single address.
The future of Ark Labs includes bringing Sheet Node to market, a B2B enterprise-grade offering that will help businesses with rebalancing liquidity. Additionally, Ark Labs has partnered with Boltz to enable off-chain Lightning liquidity management, with the intention of making swaps faster, cheaper, and easier via the Ark Node.
Argentieri and his team at Ark Labs have many new advancements in the works, but it will take time to roll these out. The company’s mission is to have a tangible result within the Bitcoin ecosystem, with people seeing Bitcoin payments get better and hoping to be part of the reason for that improvement.
