Arké is free and open source. Every line of code is public. Every design decision is documented. That's not a feature — it's the point.
Why open source
Bitcoin is open source. The tools built on top of it should be too.
Arké exists partly to demonstrate what's possible: that a bitcoin wallet can be beautifully designed, carefully built, and completely open — all at once. If other builders see it and raise their own bar, that's a success regardless of how many users Arké has.
Closed-source wallets ask you to trust them. Arké asks you to read the code.
The Bitcoin Design Guide
The Bitcoin Design Guide is a community resource that documents best practices for bitcoin wallet UX. Arké is a working implementation of those practices — built seriously, on a real protocol, for real users.
Where the guide is clear, Arké follows it. Where it's ambiguous, Arké works through the ambiguity and documents what it finds. Where the guide needs refinement, Arké contributes back.
The goal is a two-way relationship: the guide improves Arké, and Arké improves the guide.
The Ark protocol
Arké is built on Ark, a bitcoin layer 2 protocol developed by Second. Arké serves as a reference iOS wallet for the ecosystem — a concrete, open implementation that other developers can learn from, fork, or build on.
Getting Ark into users' hands faster is one of Arké's explicit goals. A well-built reference wallet helps.
Build in public
Arké is developed openly. Significant decisions — technical and design — are documented as they happen. The intention is that anyone following along can understand not just what was built, but why.
This is harder than building quietly. It's also more useful to the ecosystem.
Code
The source code is on GitHub. Issues, pull requests, and honest feedback are welcome.
Get involved
If you're a developer or designer working on bitcoin UX, Arké is meant for you as much as for end users. Read the code, open an issue, contribute a fix, or just follow along.
The Bitcoin Design community is at bitcoin.design. The Ark developer community is at second.tech.