 And I think we are live. All right, we got a special show for you today. We got one of the founders of ARK. So his name is Travis. He's a cryptocurrency investor and co-founder of ARK. Travis, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So why don't we just kind of dive into it. I quickly went on the website for ARK. I heard about you guys not too long ago, but to be honest with you, I didn't have the opportunity to investigate it. There's since it seems like there's a million startups starting every single day. So the first question just based on my own curiosity, is what is ARK? ARK is a delegated proof of stake coin. So right now we're focusing on bridging other blockchains with the ability to have push button deployable test nets and start it for startups, making everything easy. And anyone that would like to clone ARK or have their own blockchain without the Ethereum bloat, you can just come into ARK, push a button, get your test net running, see how you like it, get your settings going and start your own chain. And that chain instantly will be linked to any other ARK chain without a smart bridge. So there'll be interoperability. Can you explain to me more about dedicated proof of stake? How is that going to be different than let's say what Ethereum wants to do with your own version of proof of stake? Everybody has a different skew of DPOS like Dan Larimer's original bit shares is a little bit different than Crypti. Crypti is a little bit different than Lisk and it goes on down the line. Like other chains like Lisk is they have 101 delegates. It's 101 separate miners that control the network and verify transactions. And the way to get into the top 101 with Lisk and others like ARK is you have to be voted in. And you're voted just like a POS like proof of stake. Your coins that you hold in your wallet count as votes. So when you get voted into the top 101 or in our case, there's 51 delegates, you become a validator in the network. You run the network for everyone. So what's the minimum that one has to stake in ARK? There is no minimum. I would say, well, scratch that, the minimum probably be a transaction fee. I mean, you can't vote with 0.1 because it takes 0.1 to vote or actually I think it's one ARK to vote right now. So I guess you would have to have two ARK to vote. One ARK being in your wallet, one ARK for the transaction fee. But other than that, I mean, you can have all the ARK in your wallet. There's no real minimum. Okay. So let's do some comparison right now. So if somebody's looking at Ethereum and someone's looking at ARK, can we talk about the main differences between the two? Hey, can we pause for a second? Do you have headset bunny chance? Cause I think keep on hearing the reverb echo. Yeah, I can just turn this down a little bit. Okay. Is that better? Yeah. So you want to know what the main differences between Ethereum and ARK? I'm pretty sure we're going to get a lot of questions like that. Yeah. Right now I'm not 100% positive what the transaction speed is for Ethereum. I know it's one of the like 15 second block times, I think. ARK is running the second block times. We've already tested it at 25 transactions per second and we can scale up if need be. That's the great thing about Delegated Proof of Stake. It's green, eco-friendly. There's not a million different miners taking kilowatts of power to run a network when there's just 51 validators running the network. And if anyone wants to vote those delegates, they can offer, like to be a delegate, a lot of people will offer sharing their forging rewards. So when they offer forging sharing or profit sharing, I guess it would be called, they give a percentage back to everyone that votes them which turns your wallet into more of like a proof of stake wallet. Would this be kind of similar to how they have it in waves with the bonds? So if you wanna have a node in waves, you put up waves token, but you don't have to put up the full waves token. So let's say, I don't know what the number is now. And I think it's like $10,000 worth of waves or something, don't quote me on that. And then if you can't afford 10,000, you can actually buy into another waves node and you can actually get paid out in returns. Is that kind of similar? I'm not familiar with that. Okay. So I couldn't compare the two. I'm interested in knowing about your, because if you go on your website, you mentioned something with like smart bridge contracts. Smart bridge? It's our technology that can link blockchains to each other. Okay. So can we go into a little bit more detail for that? So for example, if I'm running something on the Ethereum EVM and I'm running something on ARC with the smart bridge, those two can communicate with each other. Correct. Okay. And so with the ARC token then represent the communication between the two? It'll be in a transaction, it would be. It's a, we call it a vendor field. It's a small snippet of code. And if Ethereum didn't want to put our vendor field smart bridge snippet of code into their coin itself and fork themselves over to be ARC compatible, we can also use encoded listener nodes that will act as intermediary hubs. Kind of like a shape shift. Mm-hmm. Well, that's interesting. Very interesting. So currently right now, what is your guy's roadmap? When do you guys launch? We launched on March 21st this year. Okay. And a current roadmap can be found at ARC.io forward slash roadmap. What's the main thing that you guys want to accomplish within let's say the next six months? Next six months, smart bridge full release, push button deployable test nets for everyone. IPFS integration. That'll be, that'll be better for less blockchain bloat and whatever we can put that right through smart bridge field. So it takes it right off. So then I'm assuming if you guys want to integrate with IPFS, there might be some integration with Filecoin as well. Yes, I'm actually looking into that right now. I'm not 100% sure on everything yet. So. What language are you guys using to code everything in ARC? ARC is no JS JavaScript base, but we are integrating every single coding language we could possibly find. We just brought in Java. We have Python now. We have Go. Somebody's working on R. .net. We have PowerShell in the works. C sharp unity. And you name it. And if you have the abilities to help us out with that, stop by, check out our GitHub and jump on it. We have bounties. Cool. We'll make sure I put in the link below the video for GitHub. So what are you finding right now? Who are the main people approaching you? So since you launched in roughly around March, who are the main, say, clientele or users you currently using ARC? A lot of developers. Okay. A lot of interested developers that don't want to go the Ethereum route, want to have their own blockchain. And the main reason, let's say, what's the main reason that they're not going towards Ethereum route? Just too much headaches with that or? I'm not 100% sure. Okay. I'm actually going to ask a few of them. So a lot of devs and then they're using, the devs are just playing around with your own independent projects, what do you say? A lot of them have, yeah, their own proposals and they want to make their own projects or blockchain projects that they want to be smart bridge compatible so they can use ARC. Are you finding any like enterprise clients or say corporations approaching you guys? Honestly, yes and no, but the partnerships I really can't talk about. Okay. We'll leave it at that. Well, currently, let's talk about this. Obviously, actually Bitcoin has their own scaling issue and we'll see what happens with SegWit and now supposedly SegWit with the two megabyte blocks. Ethereum needs to scale, they're having big issues as we just saw what, when was it? Two weeks ago or we can have to go bank core shutdown EVM and even if you do the numbers based on hashing rate and everything, even if like one DAP, let's just call it a startup, one startup is successful, it has millions of users that will shut down the EVM because they can't handle the transaction, they can't handle the load on there. So in view of that, in light of that what would you say is necessary for ARC to say command low to handle millions of users? If you mentioned you have dedicated proof of stake, you mentioned you have these bonds, what do you guys have the current platform structure to handle millions of users? And if the answer is no, what will it take to facilitate that? At this exact moment in time, millions of users, like millions of transactions per second type of thing, that is pushing it, but as time goes on, we can scale up. And as I said before, we are already seven times faster than Bitcoin and we're throttling it right now. With IPFS and our smart bridge technology, we really don't see the bloat that Ethereum is suffering right now. We won't see the bloat and anything that are delegated or validators or 51 nodes. Anytime they see an issue, they just increase their power to handle more transactions. Okay. Do you guys plan to integrate with any other wallets? Like how is the UX feel from the front end? Because I know a lot of issues with a lot of these other tokens, I know it's not a token, but a lot of issues with some of these tokens, even some of these cryptos, for example, I like Monero, but to store it on like a nice wallet, even a harder wallet, it's a pain in the ass. Yeah, we don't have that option at all. We use HD wallets, so the coins are stored on chain, not in wallets, so there's no syncing of blockchains. You can access your coins anywhere in the world. What all you have to do is download the wallet and type in your passphrase and your coins are there instantly. So we don't have that syncing issue. Hardware wallets won't be an issue either because like I said, we are using HD wallets and we have a similar base, like a similar address structure as Bitcoin. So based on what you just told me, are you actually foreseeing then future, I don't know if you want to call them dApps and Arc, whatever you want to call them, let's say startups, or are you seeing future startups and building their startup on top of Arc? Yes, actually, there's a few that are starting now. Oh, nice. There's an ICO running right now called Block Pool. They didn't even want to wait. What's it called? Block Pool. I think it's Block Pool. They're running ICO now. They didn't even want to wait for us to pull out the push button deployable test nets. They just forked us and said, well, we can implement anything else after the fact we want to get going now. So when they raise on top of Arc, are they creating their own tokens for that or how does that work? It's a long blockchain, completely. The button will be SmartBridge compatible, so it will be interoperable. You're very nice. So what do you say the biggest hurdles right now is for Arc? Biggest hurdles? I would say probably dev time and partnerships. It's hard to do, like our team is all over the world, but in order to, everyone to come together, it's kind of a pain in the ass. That's a problem of running a decentralized organization. At the moment. Yeah, it's interesting because I've spoken to many of the founders and teams around the world and people who haven't been part of the startup scene for a while and once you start actually organizing human beings together, they soon realize it's very difficult in getting chemistry together and getting things done on the human level, especially when everybody's all around the world with different time zones, different cultures, different languages, let's say. So it is quite a challenge. The great part about Arc though is we all knew each other. We all came together as friends way before this ever happened. So that's not the issue. It's the distance thing. Mm-hmm. Are you guys planning on building headquarters somewhere? We are working on a foundation. Okay. It's in the works right now, but right now, working from home or your personal offices is working very well for Arc. Everyone has their own schedule. We run internally just like an office, but everyone's at their own desk. Would you say you're having difficulties finding developers as well or that's not too much of an issue? No, actually, it's, we've been blessed by the community. Like I said, developers are coming to Arc and they want to be a part of this. We just hired our last dev, Lucio, and he came from the community. He just kept committing right to the GitHub and just kept coming up with great ideas. We pulled all his stuff and offered him a job. Nice. I'll make sure I put the GitHub link below. In fact, you want to type it in in the chat box, I'll put it in the links for the video. Yeah. There we go, yeah. Oh, I should probably put that GitHub first. Yeah. Oh, wow, long day, long day. That can relate. Try that again. Redirecting and we are good, sweet, awesome. I'll put that in the show notes. Cool. Well, I don't think so, any further, yeah. All those links are at the bottom of Arc.io. Okay. But yeah, I was gonna say, I don't think so, any further questions. You answered them all and I'm quite excited for your project. Out of everything though, out of everything though, one thing you did touch that's really important, regardless of the technology, I like the fact that you mentioned that you guys were all friends and you had chemistry before entering the partnership. So that's one thing when I do look at whether I wanna invest in something or whether I think this startup has longevity factors, is always a chemist. That's the thing in the space, a lot of people put too much emphasis on the tech and not too much emphasis on the actual human element of this, a human capital. And by the looks of it, based on just a short time I've been speaking to you and based on just a quick scan of Arc and the fact that you told me that you guys knew each other beforehand, I really like the sounds of that. So if people wanna get more information for Arc and maybe wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way to get a hold of you? Best way would be joining our Slack group. Okay. Someone from our team is always online. Okay. Right now there's, looks like 32, almost 3,300 people in there. I will make sure I put a link to the Slack group underneath this video. Actually you gotta, you got the link, yeah, just send me the link on the chat here. Yeah. There we go. Awesome. Well, we'll keep it at that. Travis, thank you so much for coming on the show. I wish you all the best and have a great day, brother. Thank you, thanks for having me.