Basically what it says in the title, I can’t find many resources explaining the differences in detail. Would appreciate if someone can explain the differences and pros/cons of each. Thank you!
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We’ll eventually get round to producing some in-depth content on this, and obviously I’m biased (I work at Second) so DYOR, but some of the current high level trade-offs from our perspective:
- Bark (our implementation of Ark) enables you to get a trustless balance via refreshes, instead of your balance being constantly exposed to a 1-of-n trust model.
- Bark’s unilateral exits (“emergency exits”) don’t require wallets to obtain exit data from the server at point of exit, and are already widely implemented across most integrated wallets.
- Some argue that Bark has higher liveness requirements (to prevent balance expiry), but in practice both Ark and Spark wallets still need high uptime to be able to detect and counteract malicious exits (although less sensitive than Lightning), so our opinion is that the difference isn’t that big here.
- Bark fees are probably going to skew a bit higher, due to the extra liquidity costs required for wallet operation.
- Bark is bitcoin-only, so if you need multi-asset, Spark or Arkade may be a better choice (although you could still pair Bark with another protocol if maximum bitcoin UX matters to you ;))