We think it's the future. But there is quite some work to be done for that to happen.

In the next year, we want to work on having all our users maintain virtual channels with the Ark server. This would be an amazing gain in user experience, especially for trustless receives and exit cost.

Then the next step is channels between individual Ark users that can be used for routing, for example.

We are working both with LDK people to add support there for Bark-based channels and with the Lightning spec working group to make channel gossip support off-chain channels in general!