"In my quest to find the best solution for Cake Wallet to offer user-friendly, non-custodial Lightning to our users, I've gone deep down the rabbit hole of both Spark and Ark. Both are quite novel approaches to Bitcoin layer two networks, and are designed at their core to be interoperable with the broader Bitcoin network for payments via the Lightning Network. While both can be used "just" for Lightning payments, both networks are positioned to rapidly expand and be used for far more than that over the coming months and years."
"While Lightning provided a promising approach to scaling Bitcoin payments, ultimately the realization that its best role is as an interoperability layer and not as a tool for end-users to run themselves has become clear. On-chain requirements, liquidity management, liveness requirements, and other core hurdles make the implementation of user-friendly, self-custodial Lightning next to impossible. This has become apparent as most Lightning wallets and use-cases have opted to use custodial or federated models out of a need to simplify the user experience and the implementation difficulty."
Bitcoin's block size constraints prevent the majority of people from making on-chain transactions, creating a need for scalable off-chain solutions. Lightning enables one on-chain transaction to support many off-chain transfers, increasing Bitcoin's payment utility. Practical Lightning adoption faces hurdles such as on-chain requirements, liquidity management, and liveness demands, which push many implementations toward custodial or federated models to simplify user experience. Spark and Ark offer novel, interoperable layer-two approaches that lower developer integration complexity, allow non-custodial user experiences, and position the networks to grow beyond simple Lightning payments.
Read at Bitcoin Magazine
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