We are thinking of creating a website showing statistics of Ark network / ability to lookup ark address / transactions.
Need few things:
- Any API endpoint available to get detailed VTXO tx detail from server. Something similar to bitcoin getrawmempool would be good
- Is there a documented way to get wallet xpub and generate all bark addresses using the xpub ? This way users can just use their xpub to lookup / verify wallet balance and transaction on the explorer . Similar example xpub lookup on BTC using blockonomics
Hey @shivaenigma, we’re not planning on exposing the entire refresh trees for public consumption. This decision was made mainly to improve privacy for users.
Users will still be able to “see” the off-chain transactions related to other users along their branch(es) of the tree, based on their own VTXO data.
Each user doesn’t really need to call an explorer or even the server to verify their wallet balance, their client can see that their VTXO’s off-chain transactions are valid, and that the root of those transactions is broadcast on-chain with the appropriate spending conditions, which is sufficient guarantee that they can unilateral exit for their total balance.
There are probably still some helpful stats for Ark users and one of the Second engineers will pitch in soon.
I would like to say that this is very risky decision and would urge you to reconsider. Few things:
- Having an alternative source of full VTXO tree will enable all users to have unilateral exits in case Ark server is down
- Multiple mirrors of VTXO tree will build redundancy and transparency among users towards actions of Ark server. In absence of this, Ark server could be akin to a custodial bitcoin exchange
Analogously even in bitcoin ecosystem, if your non custodial wallet always shows balance/history, the need of a blockexplorer can be debated. However with our multiple interactions with merchants, we have seen cases where the sender claims he sent funds but they don’t show up in receiver wallet. Having a blockexplorer provides a neutral source of truth that provides all actors in the ecosystem an incentive to remain honest.
I envisage explorers in Ark visualize VTXO tree of different servers and provide comparison of their fee, round timings , server downtimes, round participation BTC volumes etc. Work done in Arké MacOS prototype - #12 by Christoph is quite interesting and can be built upon
For the avoidance of doubt, all users will have access to unilateral exits when the Ark server is down. Each user stores the off-chain transactions related to their own VTXO—all the data they require to get back on-chain at any time. Any good wallet app will ensure that users maintain external backups of this data too.
Put another way, the absence of public transaction tree data will not make an Ark server akin to anything custodial, users will continue to retain unilateral exit rights.
Our position for now is that users should be able to choose when and how they want to share their transaction data. Building a global explorer goes against that principle.
But it is conceivable to have a block explorer with an Ark endpoint to include a user’s VTXO in the URL. A user could choose to share this with anyone else to verify a payment—all their payment data is encoded in the VTXO.