Ark team has recently covered several aspects of the ecosystem through a blog series explaining the different technologies behind the name of Ark and has also shared some information for the upcoming transaction types and features built into ARK Core v2.6 and further. The next major introduction to be made into the system will be the Hash-time locked contracts which are currently still under work but brings a completely new notion about security. In short, HTLC transactions enable two parties to exchange tokens safely and securely at the protocol level, removing the need to trust an individual who could potentially be a bad actor and withdraw from a prior agreement once they have received their tokens. HTLC is a core requirement for cross-chain atomic swaps. The ARK Team feels a necessity to be cautious and to not include HTLC in the ARK Mainnet Core 2.6 upgrade, due to potential loss of funds in the event of a double-spend attack initiated by a network rollback and a lack of finality.

HTLCs for Ark core 3.0

As previously announced in the ARK Developer Roadmap , the project is planning on building a new consensus algorithm for ARK to strengthen the key components of the Core, written from the ground-up and inspired by Tendermint BFT with stronger finality guarantees. The HTLC transaction types will be introduced to ARK Mainnet once the new consensus has been tested and implemented next year. The ARK Core developers will commence work on the new consensus algorithm after the launch of ARK Core 3.0. Users can still test the different features as HTLCs are available on Devnet so that developers can get a head start building apps that will use HTLC or simply give feedback and report bugs in exchange for rewards.More information and technical details about HTLC at https://ark.io/