FINALLY ON MAINNET! 🐶🚀

Today is the day we premiere our Bark integration for BTCPayServer. This will allow any merchant to start accepting lightning payments, store them as VTXOs on disk, and withdraw their earnings to onchain. Ark solves the inbound liquidity problem.

1/ Bark is now a Lightning backend option in Alby Hub. @getAlby built the integration on the Bark SDK in record time, just days after our mainnet launch. You can now enable Lightning payments in your hub with no Lightning node, channels, or liquidity to manage.

If you haven't heard of Ark yet, you gotta try Bark Wallet and get a taste of it. Ark is a new way to send Bitcoin instantly, and for basically free. Plus no channels to open. no liquidity to manage. no inbound capacity anxiety. and you can always exit to the blockchain even if the Ark server goes offline. Bark wraps Lightning, Ark, and on-chain into one simple wallet on your own Umbrel. Install it, send sats, and get on with your life.

Bark Wallet is my baby 🥹 Get it on umbrelOS ⬇️

This is genius. If you rotate your phone, it shows a QR code for others to scan!

WOW!

1/ Bark went live with wallet apps ready to go on day one, built by bitcoiners who've been working alongside us since long before launch. Today we're showcasing the two most polished so far: Noah and @arkebitcoin 🧵

Just got a friend to install @NoahWalletHQ on his phone, and he loved it!

Today I'm happy to announce Noah. ⛵ It's a Bitcoin wallet that @nitesh_btc and I have been working on, using the Bitcoin Ark protocol via @secondhq. Noah and the Ark protocol allow easy onboarding, Lightning Address support, easy backups, fast payments, and much more, while staying trust-minimized. With Noah, you can easily pay and receive via Lightning without dealing with channel management and inbound/outbound liquidity constraints. Onboarding is as easy as receiving a Lightning payment. When you onboard, you get an Ark VTXO (akin to a UTXO but offchain) instead of a channel. You can also onboard via onchain and internal Ark payments. Each Noah user gets a Lightning Address that they can use to receive, even offline for Noah->Noah payments. You can restore the wallet securely with just your seed phrase. Noah is available now on mainnet! Please give it a shot and let us know what you think. ⚡️

JUST IN: Second has launched Bark on Bitcoin mainnet, bringing the Ark protocol to production and aiming to make self-custodial Bitcoin as simple to use as custodial apps. Bark is designed to solve one of Bitcoin’s biggest challenges: self-custody without sacrificing user experience. While on-chain transactions can be slow and expensive during periods of congestion, and traditional Lightning wallets often require users to manage channels and liquidity, Ark takes a different approach. The protocol uses a client-server architecture where the server handles payment routing across Ark, Lightning, and on-chain rails, while users remain in control of their bitcoin and retain an emergency exit if the server becomes unavailable or malicious. The launch marks one of the most significant real-world deployments of Ark to date, as developers continue searching for ways to make self-custodial Bitcoin accessible to mainstream users without relying on traditional custodians.

Running Bark

For ready-to-go wallets, try one of the options here: second.tech/docs/built-with-… Or if you want to get hands-on with CLI, barkd, or the SDK: second.tech/docs/getting-sta…

I’m curious how Bitcoin culture will change once we get payments up to the same level as savings tech.

It's tomorrow!

A Bark VTXO doesn't have an OP_RETURN that you can put arbitrary data into. That means no ordinals, runes or inscriptions inside the Ark. You won't be able to build 3rd party metaprotocols.

Crypto people don't like how Saylor owns 4% of the BTC supply but turn a blind eye to the guy who owns 20000% of the Zcash supply.