Blockchain ecosystem, ARK has announced that the launch of its mainnet — the ARK blockchain with its Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus based cryptotoken – is set for Tuesday, 21st March, 2017. Along with the genesis block, the platform will also generate all the ARK tokens for distribution amongst the Token Exchange Campaign participants. A new decentralized digital asset token, ARK is based on advanced blockchain technology and is meant for mass consumer adoption. It incorporates features such as SmartBridge Technology, allowing it to communicate with other blockchains.
The result of months of extensive coding and testing, the mainnet launch will mark a major milestone for the ARK Crew and ARK Community alike. The team behind the development of the mainnet prioritized core stability over the speed of delivery to ensure an efficient system without errors. Significant upgrades made to ARK ecosystem includes the replacement of sidechains with SmartBridge, removal of custom node version, UI (for stability and security), and changes in constants like block time, block rewards, etc.
Once the genesis block is created on at 19:00 UTC on the release date, the crowd sale participants will be able to visit its website to claim their ARK tokens. Users can start withdrawing the tokens into their personal ARK wallets or addresses. Participants and community members can also download an updated version of the ARK personal desktop wallet from the website before the 21st of March At the same time, ARK requires existing wallet users to upgrade their ARK wallets to the latest mainnet version before launch.
Bounties are set to be added soon to the Token Exchange website after the mainnet launch, ensuring time to verify the network before distribution. ARK will make the exchanges available to the community during the initial launch period. The platform has stated that additional information on the exchanges will be added to its Slack Chat and official blog during the mainnet launch.
Once the ARK mainnet is launched, the platform intends to add IPFS as first class citizen (using SmartBridge addressing), improve the protocol (uncle forging, voting weights), remove unsecure APIs and create routing tables. Approximately one week after the mainnet launch, ARK will introduce Community Forging at block 75,600, allowing anyone to run a forging node by making use of the ARK Commander Node installer and monitoring tool. ARK has successfully tested 25 transactions per second, with 8 second block times on its testnet; however, the newly launched mainnet will be hard coded for 5 TPS, to be scaled on demand.
