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| title | sidebar_position | slug |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 1 | / |
Welcome to Ark's documentation. Here you can learn more about the protocol, how to provide liquidity and spend your coins off-chain in a fast and secure way.
🤔 Why Ark?
Bitcoin is the most secure and censorship blockchain in the world. However, it is not the fastest or the cheapest. Ark is a second-layer solution designed to help scale Bitcoin transactions by using a shared utxo model that enables confidential and off-chain payments through an intermediary server that can't steal your funds.
👷♂️ How does it work?
Start by reading the Nomenclature section to understand the key concepts and terminology used in Ark. Then, you can learn how to Board the Ark and Send Payments. Finally, you can learn how to Leave the Ark and withdraw your funds back to the Bitcoin blockchain if the server is unresponsive.
👶🏼 ELI5
Think of early private banks that issued banknotes in exchange for gold deposits. In Ark's case, instead of gold, Bitcoin on the first layer acts as the reserve. The key difference is that the Bitcoin blockchain faces issues like slow transaction times, high fees, and limited capacity for numerous transactions.
Imagine Alice has some digital gold (Bitcoin) and wants to use it for everyday transactions without actually moving the gold each time. She deposits her digital gold with a digital bank (Server) and gets a promise note. Now, whenever she wants to pay Bob, instead of moving the actual gold, she tells the digital bank to transfer the promise note to Bob. The bank prepares a new promise note for Bob and takes back Alice's note.
This system is convenient but also has a safety net. If the digital bank disappears or fails, anyone can still get their digital gold back without needing the bank's help. This is like being able to withdraw your gold from the old private bank even if the bank closed down. But unlike the old banks, where you had to physically go and get your gold, in Ark, this process is digital and automated, ensuring that your digital gold is always safe and accessible.
🤓 Protocol Specifications
Stay in the loop
- Be part of the community joining our Telegram channel.
- Ask questions and get help on Stack Overflow.
- To propose improvements on protocol open an issue on the Github repository.
Copyright
By contributing to this repository, you agree to license your work under the MIT license unless specified otherwise at the top of the file itself. Any work contributed where you are not the original author must contain its license header with the original author(s) and source.