Bark Goes Mainnet with Steven Roose | SLPfast 743

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're trying something a little bit different. We're going to try a shorter format, faster interviews. We're going to call this SLP Fast, try to get through things with no fluff. So right to it. My guest rejoining me today is Steven Roose from Second, which is the, they are the creators of Bark.
So Steven, welcome to the show, welcome back, and give us the update. What's new with Bark? I know you guys just had your Mainnet launch on June 9th.

**Steven Roose** (0:28)
Yeah, thank you for having me. We're very excited to announce that our Arc server is finally publicly available on Mainnet. So it's been about two years that we're developing an implementation of the Arc protocol. We call it Bark. It's a payments SDK using the Arc protocol. We've been on Signet for about a year. We have some DevTooling there. And for the last few months, we've been running a Mainnet server in beta.
And last week, we announced this Mainnet server to be publicly available. We announced a few integrations. So there's a few people building wallets on top of the SDK. We have NOAA Wallet, which is available for iOS and Android. It's built from scratch on our SDK. We also have Kristof from the Bitcoin design community who built Arcade Wallet, which is like a implementation of the design principles that the Bitcoin design team have been creating. Also using RSDK.
We also announced that AlbiHub is integrating Bark as one of their new experimental backends for the AlbiHub Wallet. We built our own Web Wallet that we call Bark Wallet or Bark Web. We launched this on Umbrell. We're building also an implementation of this for Start 9 We're basically packaging the Web Wallet for these like hosted at your home platforms. And we're also going to announce a Bitsy Pay Server Plug-in with like one-click install configuration to be able to receive Lightning payments. So yeah, we're super excited with all of these integrations. It's been like a really exciting week for us.
Yeah, excited.

**Stephan Livera** (2:05)
So how does Bark solve Lightning's onboarding and liquidity problems?

**Steven Roose** (2:10)
Yeah, so the main reason for building this SDK was that we noticed that Lightning, while it's really good for routing payments, it's not so good for user experience at the edges. So if you want to have a self-custodial Lightning experience, if you want to run your own, like have your own keys, sign your own big transactions, it comes with some UX hurdles, mostly around on-chain transactions to maintain your channels and liquidity. So you need to manage your inbound liquidity if you want to be able to receive.
You need to purchase liquidity, which comes with costs. So the ARK protocol makes it possible for users at the edge of the Lightning Network to be able to route Lightning payments without having these technological burdens like channels. So ARK is currently mostly like what we call last mile solution, where users connect to an ARK server. The ARK server functions as their gateway, but the client server ARK protocol is totally trustless. So the user can have full self-custody. They sign all the transactions. They always have an emergency exit available that they can use, whether the server goes offline or becomes malicious. So the user is always in full control of their funds.
But you can route Lightning payments very easily.

**Stephan Livera** (3:28)
How should Bitcoiners think about ARK compared to Lightning? Is it a replacement or is it a teammate of sorts?

**Steven Roose** (3:35)
Yeah, so like I said, it's definitely a compliment. So it's like a last mile solution, especially initially. Maybe in the future also routing channels could exist on the ARK. If on-chain fees would go really high currently, that's not really an interesting path. So we're mostly focusing on end users who want to have self-custodial Lightning receive send, but don't want to maintain channels, don't want to have the on-chain cost of creating channels, managing their inbound liquidity. So it's basically a companion for the last mile for the users, which can be merchants, which can be regular users with a phone wallet, stuff like that, sending Lightning payments.

**Stephan Livera** (4:15)
So can you give us a quick overview on the user experience? What does it look like for the end user?

**Steven Roose** (4:21)
Yeah. So the end user, we're building in SDK, so our users are developers, and these developers hopefully will create amazing wallets for end users. And for an end user, the experience is pretty seamless. So you don't have any setup, you just create a wallet, you write down your 12 words, or whatever your wallet can store the words in like your phone device or on your cloud, something like that. So wallets can choose there, but you basically have your seed, your seed phrase, and then you get a balance that you can use to both send on-chain payments, Lightning payments, receive Lightning payments, and you don't see like amount capacity errors, you don't see channel closures, you don't see like even the word channel at all. So it's a pretty, it's an experience pretty close to like the on-chain experience, only that you can do Lightning and your payments can be instantaneous and really cheap.