Researchers at TU Wien in Vienna, led by Georgia (Zeta) Avarikioti, are working on a formal security proof for the Ark protocol, a transaction batching system designed to improve Bitcoin scalability without users relinquishing custody of their funds. The project, funded by AKRLabs OÜ, has produced two key documents: a March 2026 litepaper describing the protocol’s design and its security under two operator models (rational and malicious), and a June 2026 arXiv paper further detailing formal definitions and security properties. Two vulnerabilities found in testnet implementations have since been patched. In October 2026, the independent implementation called Bark suffered a bug that resulted in a loss of 0.75 BTC, approximately $62,000, affecting project funds rather than customer assets.
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