Welcome: Ark Labs

Written By Adam Gebner

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Ark Labs, the team building Arkade.

The Problem Nobody Solved

Bitcoin has always offered something no other network can match: trustless, final settlement on the most liquid and secure ledger in the world. But for a decade, stablecoins and programmable finance propagated elsewhere, to networks that could support fast execution, conditional logic, and the operational features that real commerce demands.

The result? Fragmentation. Digital dollars scattered across dozens of chains, none of them offering Bitcoin's neutrality or liquidity. Lightning solved speed for payments, but not programmability. Liquid solved programmability, but introduced federation. Rollups and sidechains introduced new trust assumptions or tokens.

Ark is different. It separates fast, offchain execution from trustless onchain finality using a novel architecture called Virtual Transaction Outputs (VTXOs). Users transact with pre-signed, Bitcoin-valid transactions that can be finalized on the base layer at any time; no wrapped assets, no new tokens, no custodial intermediaries. Operators coordinate execution and batch-settle to Bitcoin, while users retain unilateral exit rights at all times.

Why Stablecoins Need Bitcoin

On other networks, stablecoin infrastructure is increasingly captured by single companies, by validators with extractive interests, by permissioned rails dressed up as decentralized systems. Bitcoin offers something different: a neutral settlement layer with no governance token, no foundation politics, and no rewinding the blockchain.

Arkade gives issuers a way to operate directly on that layer. Businesses can issue, move, and trade stablecoins and digital assets without fragmenting liquidity across chains. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, pioneered stablecoins on Bitcoin over a decade ago, joined in this round of investment and is now backing Ark Labs.

The Founders

Marco Argentieri (CEO) has been building on Bitcoin since 2013. He launched some of Italy's earliest Bitcoin services, led covenant-based development at Vulpem Ventures, and served on the Liquid Network Technology Board. Andrew Camilleri (CTO) is the lead contributor to BTCPay Server, one of the most widely deployed self-custodial payment processors in Bitcoin. Alex Bergeron (Head of Ecosystem) brings community and protocol expertise from his time at Blockstream during the scaling debates and at Bitcoin Magazine.

This is a team with rare credibility in Bitcoin Layer 2 design and they've already shipped. Arkade went live on mainnet in October 2025, with infrastructure partners across payments, lending, and cross-chain settlement in production.

What Comes Next

The $5.2 million seed round, with investments from ego death capital, Tether, Epoch VC, Lion26, Contribution Capital,  and participation from Anchorage Digital, Ralph Ho, and others, will accelerate team growth, partner onboarding, and the developer tooling needed to bring stablecoin and Bitcoin liquidity together at scale.

Beyond the core protocol, the team is building in three directions: programmable finance (contracts, conditional logic, structured products), confidential execution (private transactions with auditability), and an agentic development toolkit (a standard interface for developers, applications, and autonomous agents to build on Arkade).

We see Arkade becoming foundational infrastructure for the next generation of Bitcoin-native financial applications, the backend for wallets, neobanks, and payment apps that want to build on the most secure and neutral settlement layer in the world.

We're proud to back the Ark Labs team.

Learn more:

— ego death capital

Adam Gebner
Next

Announcing: Five Bells Settlement