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Arké is starting to get there. Here’s a quick signet test where I sent 100 Ark payments from my CLI wallet into the app. Works very smoothly.

Right now is a time of testing & polishing. The Second team has done a few more releases with various fixes and improvements, so it’s all about messing around and seeing what works and what breaks. I’ll often create multiple new wallets per day and run scripts like that one in the video above to populate the app. I also added a payment testing view to settings where you can generate 100 lightning invoices at a time, or make 100 payments to an address as fast as possible. It’s signet, so if you’re in the TestFlight, feel free to experiment.

Last week I somehow still managed to break a refresh and an exit. Pretty sure those were weird edge cases and they might be fixed now in the latest Bark release, but that’s where we are right now. Stability and polish. Great place to be.

On the UX side of things, I made the balance detail view dark. The balance card has this dark-ish pattern, so it feels more like going into the balance when the view you navigate to is also dark. You’ll also notice that the refresh indicator is simpler. The app now automatically refreshes for you when VTXOs enter the part of their lifecycle when the server charges no fees for a refresh. Still need to tweak some communication around that to ensure users have a basic understanding.

The fee schedule is new. It’s a companion to the fee summary. The former shows you the math behind fees, the latter shows what you actually paid. The Fee Schedule is more of a transparency feature and is therefore pretty far down in the settings view. I think it could also communicate more clearly and still needs some iteration.

There’s also a small experiment I just added. You’ve already been able to add your name and profile image, which is then used in the BIP-21 URI and QR code. Now there’s a button next to “Share” to share a vCard with your payment info. You can share it with others in chat apps and the vCard will be nicely rendered as a contact card. Others can add you to their contact book, and send you bitcoin with a tap. I am not 100% convinced yet that this is a great user experience, but seems worth testing.

I still have about 130 (mostly very small) things on my to-do list. The biggest one is still the emergency exit. Just a bunch of technical complexity that bleeds into the UI, coupled with a highly sensitive activity for the user as it’s about rescuing potentially lost funds when an Ark server stops collaborating. I am currently reviewing the whole user experience of this feature to ensure it feels trustworthy and simple enough. Really takes a lot of iteration to get this to feel right. And ideally, no-one will ever need to use this feature.

Emerging from the building phase, I’m also planning user testing sessions. There’s a great local meetup and the upcoming conferences around the end of May and into June will also be good opportunities. No matter how earth shattering I think Arké is, others need to find it useful and appealing. That information will also be helpful in putting together a case study for the guide (speaking of case studies, check out the new one about SeedSigner).

Also had some interesting conversations around the Pave Protocol I wrote about in my last post. Turns out some people are working on enabling more Lightning to Mobile Money services and Pave could be a good match on the wallet side. Aqua Wallet also just implemented ChapSmart to allow users to make M-Pesa payments in Tanzania. Pave would standardize these integrations, so wallets could easily interact with lots of these providers across countries. Promising trend, let’s see what happens.

On a completely different note, I also wrapped up the latest milestone of Bitcoin Icons. It’s a big one with 40 new icons, bringing the total in the set to 165. As far as usage goes, the Vue and React npm modules have 2K downloads per month at the moment.

Also, check out the AI usage & adoption report by Spiral. I found the archetypes super interesting in showcasing how diversely empowering AI is, and to inform my thinking about how I work. I am also mentioned in there somewhere.

Hope all is well with you and you get to enjoy Spring.

✌️🇺🇦