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The Bark plugin for BTCPay Server is now ready for merchants to get started. It's the simplest way to get your store Lightning-enabled, with no Lightning node, channels, or inbound liquidity to manage. To see it in action, buy something from our new swag store, also powered by the plugin!

Payjoin boards are now available in Bark and enable a wallet app to receive a Payjoin and board onto Ark in the same transaction, saving the user fees and time. The same trick can also be used to on-ramp onto a Cashu mint running Bark, no channel management required. It may also be the first example of Transaction Cut-Through bitcoin has seen, a 13-year-old idea from Greg Maxwell!

It's hardening season. Bark 0.7.0 is all about improving security and reliability. There's nothing more important to be working on right now. Thanks to Project Loupe and Greg Sanders for the disclosures behind several fixes.

We've released Bark 0.6.2. You can now use one call to pay anything: an Ark or on-chain address, any Lightning destination, or a multi-rail BIP 321 URI, with a fee estimate for each option when there's more than one way to pay. Bark can also now cosign a Payjoin-funded board, enabling boards from external wallets and some interesting Cashu interop. And big thanks to the bitcoin Red Team and Project Loupe for the responsible disclosures behind several of this release's fixes.

Two Bark releases in two days...we hope you'll understand given the emerging security environment in bitcoin. 0.6.0 has some breaking changes you're going to want to pay attention to: it's required to continue support for refreshes and Lightning payments, so please get updated asap. We know this may be a disruptive update, so let us know if we can help. And thanks to Philipp Hoenisch of Lendasat for the report behind a fix.

Bark 0.5.0 is out, and it delivers one of our most requested features. A wallet's full off-chain balance can now be restored from its mnemonic alone, retrieved from the server. Lightning receives can now land on external Ark addresses, unlocking non-custodial Lightning address servers (thanks to Ben Carman for this work), and delegated refreshes can be scheduled ahead of time, when they're cheaper. Note that boarding now requires bark 0.5.0, so upgrade your clients to keep boarding.

Bark Wallet is now available on the Start9 Registry: send and receive payments over Ark, Lightning, and on-chain from your own server, with no channels and no liquidity management. This build of Bark Wallet ships with a continuous encrypted backup system, credit to Start9's Matt Hill for building it. If you run a Start9 server, give it a spin.

We've been doing some research on client-side Lightning pathfinding for Bark wallet apps. Instead of the Ark server working out the best payment route on the user's behalf, the wallet app builds the route and the payment onion itself, so the destination is not shared with the server and potentially eliminating minimum fees on Lightning transactions.

Bark 0.4.0 is out, and receiving just got simpler: one BIP 321 payment request covers Ark, Lightning, and on-chain, built in a single barkd call or straight from the SDK. Also in this release: fee quotes for on-chain payments before you send, wallet notifications without a websocket, control over exactly which VTXOs a payment spends, and crash safety across every payment operation.

Since launching on mainnet, we've been hard at work refining Bark's DX and UX, guided by all the feedback we've been getting from early integrators and users. Some of the highlights from releases 0.2.3 to 0.3.0: Bark now pays LNURL links anywhere it accepts a Lightning address, you can run barkd as a containerized web app to back browser-based wallets, and wallet setup is simpler with one consistent flow and per-platform storage defaults. Your bitcoin also stays liquid mid-exit: an Ark balance can be spent right up until your emergency exit's leaf transaction is confirmed on-chain (spending quietly cancels the ongoing exit).