Meetups are the geek\'s answer to darts and drinking. Millennial solutions for a good night out seem to include an evening of talking about blockchain, although in this case, it being the Netherlands, there was at least beer involved.

Members of the Ark Community gathered at a local brewery outlet in Utrecht on February 10th for an Ark/Crypto meeting to chat about Ark, cryptocurrency and generally about blockchain. Many members would never normally meet face to face, but only through popular forums, tech platforms and social media. Led by Ark guru Samuel Zwaan, there was a strong focus on projects funded by the Ark Community Fund, which provides seed funding for blockchain developments through the ARK ecosystem.

The Ark project created a smart bridge off Ethereum to build its own blockchain, and it deploys push-button forks to new enterprises starting their own blockchains. The Ark project was co-developed by the developer of Lisk, in 2016, and launched with an ICO that raised almost US$100,000.

Many subsequent bridges have been built on the Lisk model using the Delegated Proof of Stake consensus, which means it operates more democratically and more energy-efficiently, as each wallet holder delegates their stake to a named delegate node. These methods are increasingly replacing the energy consumptive Proof of Work systems initiated by Bitcoin.