If you read our last announcement, then you know the ARK Ecosystem, SCIC is moving our development efforts to Polygon. We see this as a huge leap forward in capability and we wanted to outline what we see as the major benefits of this migration for both our company and our products. While we will be covering a few of the most important benefits today, there are far more than just what is on this list. We highly recommend you look deeper into Polygon to see just how deep the possibilities go. Let’s take a look at the benefits of moving to Polygon.
1. Scalability
The Problem:
The ARK Network and ARK Core have continued to lag behind the rest of the industry when it comes to layer-1 performance. While our efforts to strengthen the network and increase efficiency have helped, ARK is far from optimal when compared to the leading layer-1 blockchains. ARK has also never been fully tested under the levels of real-world transaction volume that other networks have, which makes large-scale performance unpredictable.
How Polygon Fixes This:
Polygon has established itself over several years by processing millions of transactions at high volume and at scale. On top of that, Polygon is the current leader in both research and development of layer-2 solutions that will power the future of blockchain scalability. Hands-down, this is a massive upgrade in scalability from day 1 which will allow us to focus on building applications targeted at tens of thousands of users, without any worry about whether the network can handle the pressure.
2. Compatibility
The Problem:
ARK was built to be a different take on how a layer-1 blockchain would function. While others looked to combine all of the activity on one chain, we believed that their approach was unsustainable and would not scale. Instead, we chose to build our system in a way that would create thousands of autonomous chains, or “Application Specific Blockchains”, that would be interconnected through a form of bridge.
Over time, the industry has shown that users prefer the megalithic-chain approach. Having many applications and functions all bundled into one solitary chain has proven to not only scale, but maintain efficiency in most cases. As more developers and companies poured into the Ethereum ecosystem and put their energy towards Solidity and ETH tooling, layer-1 blockchains like ARK were left on the outside looking in.
How Polygon Fixes This:
Polygon was built from the ground up to be Ethereum compatible and is 100% compatible with almost all Ethereum tools and services. This allows for a wide range of options when it comes to developer tooling and infrastructure partners. Not only that, but it is fully EVM compliant, meaning all forms of smart contracts are backward compatible. This opens up a huge library of existing contracts that have been tested from both a security and efficiency standpoint.
NFTs, DeFi systems, DAOs and more can be built immediately without needing to completely design and build the underlying layer-1 systems prior to being able to focus on any kind of application or interface. This will greatly improve our efficiency and ability to rapidly build applications and deploy new features when compared to building both, layer-1 and subsequent applications ourselves.
3. Connectivity
The Problem:
As mentioned previously, ARK Core was intentionally built to create autonomous, Application Specific Blockchains. That means that each blockchain built with ARK would be its own stand-alone blockchain, separate from any other. The goal was to find a way to interconnect these blockchains through a form of Bridge. While this is possible today, most bridges (including ACES), have major issues when it comes to security. In fact, most cross-chain bridges are the point of weakness in recent hacks. Building and maintaining a proper bridge would be a full-time job for our company and would cost tens of millions to develop and manage.
On top of that, building and maintaining a cross-chain bridge is seen by regulators as the equivalent of running a cryptocurrency exchange. This requires the entire legal teams just to cover the regulatory environment and ensure that we are staying on the right side of the law and meeting all fiduciary requirements. It would also require that ARKVault be compliant with full KYC on any user who utilizes the bridge.
That kind of obligation is simply unsustainable for our company.
How Polygon Fixes This:
The Polygon ecosystem is much larger than that of ARK. With thousands of developers and funding in the billions, Polygon is able to develop, manage, and/or fund entire companies dedicated to bridging their network with the other top layer-1s. They already have a working and sustainable bridge between Polygon and Ethereum which has been running steadily for years. The compatibility with EVM and Ethereum also makes this much easier to integrate and take advantage of moving forward and is a more elegant solution that requires no added development effort or regulatory complexity for our company.
4. Developer Access
The Problem:
ARK is a proprietary layer-1 blockchain built utilizing the JavaScript programming language (TypeScript to be specific). While there are thousands of web developers who are well versed in TypeScript, they tend to be more focused on front-end development or JavaScript-based full-stack development frameworks. While we believe being able to appeal to those developers would be a benefit to ARK, in reality, the majority of them do not possess the requisite knowledge and skill in areas such as cryptography that are paramount to blockchain development for a layer-1. This posed a major problem when it came to finding developer talent.
How Polygon Fixes This:
Polygon is based on Ethereum and utilizes Solidity smart contracts and handles all of the heavy lifting when it comes to the layer-1 / cryptographic side of the house. By not having to rebuild every aspect of the consensus engine and the layer-1 functionality, we can focus on application development that falls more in line with our expertise and the skillset we currently have available. In addition, finding developers familiar with Solidity to build any smart contract functionality is much easier than finding developers who want to learn a proprietary smart transaction system that is used by a very small pool of developers. This is a major advantage for us moving forward and will help us more easily find the developer talent necessary to make our products and/or services a success.
5. Community Growth & Partnerships
The Problem:
Due to our struggles in building the layer-1 blockchain for all of the reasons previously discussed, ARK’s community has dwindled over the past 5+ years. It is also very hard to bring users into an entirely new ecosystem when they are already familiar with things like MetaMask, Coinbase, OpenSea, and other platforms that do not interface with non-Ethereum blockchains. When approaching partners, it is a struggle to garner any kind of interest as soon as they hear you are A.) Not running on Ethereum/Polygon, B.) Are a stand-alone TypeScript blockchain.
In the past, the few interested parties who did inquire about partnerships with ARK, often only wanted to secure funding and when they could not, quickly jumped ship somewhere else.
This combination has made it very hard to find partners willing to build on ARK which in turn, with no prominent applications being built by partners, has made it very hard to engage and maintain any semblance of community or create excitement about the product.
How Polygon Fixes This:
Polygon has one of the largest communities in the industry and major partners like Adidas, Starbucks, Adobe, the NFL, DraftKings, Disney, Meta, Stripe, and many more. They also have entire teams dedicated to connecting developers within their ecosystem to create synergy between applications. The experience has already been night and day when compared to working in the isolation of a stand-alone layer-1 with very little support outside of our own efforts. The strength of the Polygon community and its partner network are a huge benefit and a large part of why we are so optimistic about his move.
Tip of The Iceberg
While the items we outlined today would be enough to justify the move, they are just the tip of the iceberg. The benefits of moving to Polygon are tenfold and we believe it is the clear choice for ARK moving forward. We also understand that many of you are keen to find out more information about what we will be building next. While we aren’t quite ready to rip the lid off of that one just yet, if you have been a fan of any of our products in the past, we think you are really going to like what comes next!
Stay tuned for our next blog which will go into how the migration will work and a preview of the interface. Remember to only follow the official sources of information which include our blog and Twitter account.
