Staring into the abyss below, you won’t find any moon talk here. An objective look at the negatives of investing in Ark. I’ll jump right in.
Perhaps the most obvious, critical and frustrating critique of Ark is its marketing. I’m a firm believer of Tech before hype, but it’s become increasingly apparent that in a market as hyped & reactive as this, those who shout the loudest win. It’s important to have the tech too, but it doesn’t always have to be great, or even exist yet, as IOTA and Cardano have shown. Both use existing tech but market to great effect, with that added pinch of luck. Ethereum itself bumbled along until it announced its ‘Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and showcased the utility to the world in the form of ICOs.
There are a number of complaints brought up about Ark’s marketing strategy, or lack of. To begin, the team has vast reserves; they have rainy day funds for the long, long term future of Ark, and keep 52.5% of their money aside for development, by law. Their certainly isn’t as much liquid money as some shout about, but there needn’t be, $250,000 would go a long way. Hire 3 – 4 top notch marketing professionals, sales executives, a spokesperson!! etc. Have them attend conferences, respond to online outlets, speak to businesses, run new bounty campaigns - aimed at attracting developers, increasing usage. Effectively, let the developers crack on without worry & support, & improve, the existing marketing team.
They may very well be trying to do this, believe it or not its relatively hard to recruit effectively for blockchain start-ups. SALT itself has had a director role open for the last 2 months, salary circ. £100,000. Good professionals are less likely to take the risk with start-ups in the cryptosphere.
It’s a vicious circle of sorts; little exposure maintains little confidence that makes it hard to recruit. The lack of vocal, clear vision from the team doesn’t help. It’s certainly possible to market what Ark has, but when quizzed on specifics, it’d become a hard job very quickly.
It appears to me at least that the team doesn’t particularly want to market yet. The blockchain & delegate node have some bugs & security issues that will hopefully be solved when ArkcoreV2 comes out. Although, again, developers haven’t inspired confidence that this will happen. It also seems that they are satisfied with price, confident of adoption when tech arrives.
With all that in mind I think it’s important to refer to the EEA point once again, Ethereum had the tech, the ability, a slow growing presence, and then It catapulted upon announcement. I feel as if a similar scenario will occur with Ark; however timing is of the essence for the investor. The crypto market will grow substantially over the course of the next two years. Will the Ark move fast enough to give investors that return?
No clear vision from the team is another frustrating negative feature of investing in Ark. Most importantly concise, understandable, clarification is needed; how Ark will be used and derives value? Will it be used for transaction fees, a sort of Gas for the ecosystem? Will it be used as a trust less currency with built in coin swap function? From my reading it’s a yes to both, but it’s not relayed effectively. If that the case then DPoS interest could provide a great return for investors, the interest covering transaction fees, operating ACES node fees etc.
Some minor complaints have been found about lack of progress on Technical documentation (25% complete), but this will be updated alongside the new core, with any hope! I wouldn’t place too much stress or worry about lack of progress on this feature. An additional whitepaper updates has been promised, to represent project advancements, but no release yet.
However this is my issue, make that apparent to investors, put the ‘Tech docu..’ square at the bottom of the roadmap, with a note explaining the ongoing issue, transparent, informative & engaging for the community.
Ark’s DPoS system is routinely touted as the gold standard of DPOS systems. A few articles have been bandied about that doubt the integrity of the system, Vitalik recently posted his thoughts. We’ve had no rebuttal. This is the crux of the issue, it may be that Vitalik is incorrect, but new users, sweaty palmed investors don’t see any correction, who’s right who’s wrong. Oh I’ll place my money in something safe. We lose investment, we lose progress.
One way to increase progress, exposure would be new exchange listings; I only have a couple of minor complaints in this department. Ark seems to have its own vision for coin swaps, exchanging and trades but it doesn’t make sense to distance the project from traditional exchange sites and pair with small exchanges.
I can’t shake the feeling that more could be done, the wallets should have a buy Ark function, similar to the Byteballs wallet, this would massively increase user adoption and maybe that’s what their recent Blockport partnership, partly, aims to solve. I think Ark’s vision will pay off here, 3 new exchange announcements were made in December, with USDT & USD pairs. Patience needed.
However, what’s truly worrisome is the lack of foresight regarding ArkVM. ArkVM on the mainchain is necessary for trust-less coin swaps, the assumption was that this would happen automatically. This has been thrown into doubt recently which would spell disaster for Ark’s value. The community has contingency plans, and the devs seem responsive and reactive to the community’s concerns, but needing to have these conversations throw doubt into investor minds.
Finally, Arkcore update can’t come soon enough. Technical bugs, security flaws and high transaction & voting fees are quietly hindering the coin. Delegate nodes drop from time to time, and the blockchain is lagging behind.
I think this much needed update, plus the team’s contentment at current market cap price, are leaving the team to delay solid marketing for the project