Lition Update and Q2 Recap — July 2020

We hope this message finds everyone well. As we enter the second half of 2020, we are pleased to share a Q2 recap, and more.

Although it’s been quiet on the communication front over the past few weeks, everyone from the Lition team has been incredibly busy behind the scenes. The year has had its share of ups and downs across the globe, but we have remained steadfast in our mission to become the leading business solution for bringing innovative blockchain applications to the mass-market in a legally compliant way.

A lot has happened, and there is much to talk about, so let’s get right to it!

A Look Back — Q2 Recap

As Q2, 2020 recently came to a close, we wanted to take a moment to look back and recap an important period for Lition. Blockchain is teeming with activity so it’s common for news to quickly fade into the background. However, we believe that there were key developments, partnerships and achievements from this quarter that will continue to evolve and play a pivotal role in Lition’s future growth.

An unexpected obstacle we encountered in Q2 was one that we faced together with the rest of the world — the unprecedented challenges of Covid-19 health crisis. Although our internal operations were close to full strength, we did experience disruptions to employees, cancellation of events, and delays to business plans as a result of the outbreak.

Ultimately, we’re proud of the resilience shown by everyone. Not just here in our building but to everyone around the world. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to everyone affected.

We would also like to send out a very special thanks to our community, who continued their unwavering support for Lition as the pandemic reshaped all of our lives. Your dedication to the project and support for our vision is what drives us to succeed.

Q2 Business and Strategic Development

Lition Joins The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

April 6, 2020 — Lition announced its membership in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the de facto standards organization for enterprise blockchain.

We’re delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate with the largest developer community in the world and a member-base of blockchain leaders, adopters, innovators, developers, and businesses from around the globe working together to bring about industry solutions.

We believe that the connections and relationships we are building within the EEA will be very valuable to our ecosystem.

N26 and Lition Expand Strategic Partnership

June 5, 2020 — GreeN26, powered by Lition, is now at the fingertips of all N26 customers in Germany — directly in the N26 Banking App!

In February, Lition’s sustainable energy tariff GreeN26 was already available as a benefit to all N26 employees living in Germany. We followed that up last month with this great achievement expanding and deepening the partnership with one of the worlds most successful Fintech Unicorns.

Lition Joins Forces with EEA EMINENT Task Force

April 23, 2020 — Upon joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance we quickly identified the EEA EMINENT Task Force as a natural fit for Lition. It wasn’t long before we announced that we would be contributing to that cross-industry effort to drive adoption by teaming up with Chainlink, Unibright and Anyblock Analytics.

EMINENT (Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises) was recently formed as a branch of the EEA Mainnet Working group. Lition joins the key task force to assist in creating reliable standards and specifications for businesses that want to integrate Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP), or other corporate systems of record with Ethereum.

Lition Integrated into Salesforce CRM Platform

April 9, 2020 — We were thrilled to share with our community that Lition had been integrated into the Salesforce CRM Platform. This integration provides Lition with the opportunity to gain additional traction and usage by making our technology easily accessible through the world’s #1 CRM platform.

Any salesforce user, from small businesses to fortune 500 companies, will have the power to easily record, certify and protect important information in a confidential and tamper-proof manner using Lition’s App on Salesforce’s cloud system.

The functionality will be similar to our Schürmann Rosenthal Dreyer use case. The difference is that Salesforce puts Lition’s blockchain at the fingertips of more than 150,000 users around the world with a simple setup process.

This integration will play a big role in ongoing development and traction for Lition and we will have additional updates regarding the progress in the future.

Lition Enters Brand Partnership with Sparwelt, RTL to Drive Blockchain-Powered Green Energy

May 5, 2020 — Lition reached an agreement with RTL media group subsidiary Sparwelt GmbH, on a groundbreaking co-branding and marketing partnership.

Sparwelt and Lition teamed up to bring co-branded green energy products to German consumers. The energy products are marketed under Sparwelt’s brand, but 100% of the settlement and energy related processes will be handled by Lition and the Lition Blockchain. The deal involves a significant TV media budget including a commercial running in prime advertising spots.

The Lition Solar Power Revolution Arrived

June 21, 2020 — We were excited to announce that our new solar product is live — the first commercially live peer-to-peer marketplace for small-scale solar panels on anyone’s rooftop!

Any household in Germany can now easily generate and sell solar power through our blockchain-powered energy marketplace. Just like the previously existing peer-to-peer trading which used to be reserved for larger power plants, all trades are processed through the Lition Layer 2 blockchain infrastructure.

To celebrate the start of the solar revolution, we also launched a brand new Lition Energy website.

Q2 Best of Media

• Samuel Haig of Cointelegraph interviewed Lition CEO Richard Lohwasser about how blockchain is being used across Germany’s evolving renewable energy sector.
• N26 Partnership expansion was mentioned on the N26 blog.
• Richard was also featured in this Handelsblatt article, “How Digital Green Electricity Start-ups are Stirring up the Market”
• The SparEnergie TV spot, featuring Lition, was aired in prime broadcasting spots on RTL media group networks.

Our Salesforce Integration was featured in:

• Cointelegraph — the leading independent digital media resource covering a wide range of news on blockchain technology, crypto assets, and emerging fintech trends
• Coinspeaker — The leading news outlets written for Finance, Stocks, Technologies and Blockchain.
• Analytics India Magazine — India’s leading online platform chronicling advances in Analytics, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
• ChainNews — Major Chinese news outlet.

Q2 Developments

Blockchain Team

We believe we’ve built a premier blockchain development team. One with the knowledge, talent and experience necessary for Lition to achieve our technological vision.

Our website is now updated with everyone’s photos and bios. Find below the key members of our blockchain team.

Patricio Mosse — Lead Blockchain Engineer

Patricio is a software engineer with 15+ years of experience in technology projects in development and leadership roles, both for the industry and for the university. He holds a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires and he completed his MSc. Thesis at the University of Montpellier in France. In the recent years he has focused in Blockchain, working mostly with Ethereum, Cosmos and Hyperledger.

Dragos Ilie — Blockchain Solution Architect

Dragos is a blockchain expert with a Master’s of Engineering in Computer Science from Imperial College London with extensive hands on experience. Besides his work he is pursuing a PhD focused on blockchain security and consensus mechanisms. He co-authored multiple papers proposing protocol updates to improve the security guarantees of the signature scheme in Bitcoin. In the last two years, Dragos gained experience in designing smart contract architectures on Ethereum by leading the development efforts in two blockchain projects.

Eugene Melnikov — Senior Blockchain Engineer

Eugene is a very experienced specialist, working in IT for more than 10 years. He currently focuses on different blockchain families such as Ethereum, Hyperledger, Bitcoin, and Graphene. Eugene successfully implemented number of blockchain projects, participated in hackathons and meetups, continuously learning new technologies and dreaming about decentralizing the world. He has been a Blockchain Engineer for Smart Contracts for Etherisc, a IoT Developer, Blockchain Software Engineer, Ruby Developer and a PHP Developer for Altoros.

Recently Open Sourced Code

Last month we announced that some of our progress in regards to the IBFT consensus was open sourced.

In the Lition Maker Node Manager repository, we keep the code to manage certain aspects of each node such as the notarization, some communication with smart contracts and also one of the solutions for voting to exclude nodes that appear to be offline. These portions were open sourced because we wanted to give members of the community the ability to audit those aspects of the code.

To clarify, not all code or progress regarding the IBFT consensus and blockchain were pushed to the public repository. The main repository still remains private. Furthermore, fixing the consensus issue was largely an offline task that requires theoretical research and tests.

To summarize, the code that is currently available in the public repository in no way reflects the actual progress to date. We apologize if this caused any confusion.

Lition Pool Staking Upgrade

Lition pool staking has been a huge success with approximately 25 million Lition staked at the time of publication.

We deployed fourteen new Lition Pool Staking contracts to resolve an issue some users were experiencing with high Ethereum gas costs. Contracts are now less congested, and the code has been optimized to reduce the amount of gas required by each operation. Launching these additional contracts allows us to keep transactions minimized while continuing to offer transparent, readable and user friendly contracts.

Development Update

A comprehensive development update will be provided next week, courtesy of our Blockchain Solution Architect, Dragos Ilie.

In the meantime, we wanted to provide a very brief update about what was the main breakthrough leading to the final push to the Lition 2.0 launch.

We identified some features at the network level that were causing sync problems. We determined that it would be best to refactor it and move it to the node level. At the same time, it was safer to move some code from the consensus to the network level, to reduce the probability of delays.

To build a more robust solution we decided to slow down the implementation of some fixes and reorganize the responsibility of each component.

Delays are not ideal, but we don’t merely want to produce a solution that works. We‘re aiming to engineer an efficient and versatile solution that is full production grade and ready for the intensive business and enterprise use cases it will serve.

Despite the new challenges that hit us during Q2, we are on track and are approaching the very end of the optimization process of our blockchain. More on that in our next extensive Dev update. Stay tuned.

Onward!

We believe we are working towards truly remarkable technology, and supporting infrastructure, that will allow Lition to become one of the world’s leading blockchain infrastructures for business. We remain committed to this journey and are excited about what lies ahead.

On behalf of the entire team, we sincerely appreciate all of your support.