Last month, Bark Wallet launched on Umbrel, and with it came requests for Bark Wallet on Start9. Well, here it is: Bark Wallet is now available on StartOS!

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Installing Bark Wallet from the Start9 Registry.

Why Bark Wallet belongs on your home server

Bark Wallet is an open-source wallet app from the Second team. It’s simple and it just works:

  • Any network. Send and receive payments over Ark, Lightning, and on-chain.
  • Zero upkeep. Refreshes, Lightning receives, and exits (if you ever need one) all run quietly in the background, so your wallet stays healthy and trust-minimized.
  • No channels, no liquidity management. Start receiving Lightning payments the second you set up a wallet.

You use the app from your browser, but it runs on barkd, our wallet daemon, which ships the whole Bark experience out-of-the-box on persistent platforms: desktops, servers, and, yes, nodes. An always-online Start9 is exactly the environment barkd was built for.

What’s new since the Umbrel launch

Bark Wallet has developed a lot since it first hit the Umbrel app store. We’ve fixed a few bugs and shipped a lot of improvements. A couple of highlights:

  • A new VTXO page. You can now inspect the individual VTXOs that make up your balance.
  • An authentication page. The Start9 build adds a password-protected login for the web UI, so your wallet isn’t sitting open on your local network.
Bark Wallet’s new VTXO page.

The new VTXO page lists the VTXOs that make up your balance, each with its expiry block and time, status, and amount in sats. Most users will never need to touch them, but power users can select one or more to refresh, offboard, or emergency exit.

Continuous backups, thanks to Matt

This is my favorite part of the Start9 release. The StartOS build ships with its own continuous backup system, and the credit here goes to Matt Hill from the Start9 team. He didn’t just help out, he built most of it himself.

Bark Wallet’s service dashboard on StartOS, prompting for a backup target.

The backup service watches the wallet database, and every time your wallet mutates, it ships an encrypted snapshot to the backup targets of your choice: Google Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, or SFTP. The encryption keys are derived from your seed, so restoring is automatic: no separate passphrase to remember or lose.

There’s even a staleness guard that compares backup generations across targets, so a rolled-back backup can never trick the wallet into losing funds. And local backups run unconditionally, included in your native StartOS backups.

It’s solid work, and it makes running a self-custodial Ark wallet on your own server feel a lot safer. Thanks, Matt!

A reference for your own wallet project

The Start9 package is open source on GitHub and MIT licensed, with bark-web itself on GitLab. If you’re thinking about building on barkd, Bark Wallet is a working reference for how our own team would approach a wallet app. Take inspiration from it…or just fork it!

The simplest way to run a Lightning wallet on Start9

Bark Wallet is a great way to get started with Lightning and Ark on Start9 without having to worry about channels and liquidity management. If you run a Start9 server, install Bark Wallet from the marketplace, top up over Lightning, and send some sats to a friend.

And if you don’t have a Start9, there’s the Umbrel app, or Noah and Arké for iOS and Android.

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