Introduction
Lisk is a blockchain platform utilizing Sidechains which makes it easy for any developer to build, publish, distribute and monetize his or her own blockchain application written in JavaScript. So, how does Lisk achieve that? Let’s have a look.
Like I already mentioned in an article about Nebulas, today’s blockchain projects are struggling with problems such as scalability, transaction speed, interoperability, sustainability and security, just to name a few aspects. This often results in slow and expensive transactions. Ethereum, for example, tries to solve this issue with Sharding, amongst other things. Bitcoin is using the Lightning network to enable off-chain transactions. Lisk takes a different approach and promises modularity, scalability, reliability, security and independence. What if everybody could just create his oder her own blockchain?
Let’s start at the beginning. Lisk is actually a fork of Crypti. Crypti was a project created in 2014 striving for a decentralized application platform for JavaScript developers. As many Crypto projects back then Crypti died. So, Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows took over the project and gave it a new name: Lisk. Lisk then did an ICO in 2016 and collected around $6.500.000 USD at that time (one LSK token was at $0.07 USD in the ICO). At the moment the Lisk Foundation has almost $96 million USD in Crypto assets. You can have a look at it here. Shortly after that the Lisk mainnet went live.
Lisk’s price at the time of writing is $3.87 USD or 55k sats. With a circulating supply of 108.791.258 LSK this brings it to a total market cap of approx. $420.00.000 USD ranking it #27 on CMC. The LSK all time high was at almost $40 USD and some time later at 340k sats, when looking at BTC ratio. LSK has no limited total supply. Similar to Bitcoin’s block reward the LSK reward per block also decreases over time. In 2016 it was 5 LSK, in 2017 it was 4 LSK per block, in 2018 it is 3 LSK, in 2019 it will be 2 LSK and eventually in 2020 it will be 1 LSK per block. That would make it a total of 145 million LSK in 2020. The block reward will then remain at 1 LSK / block. By the way, the block time of LSK is ten seconds. So there’s a new LSK (block) being forged every ten seconds.
Writing code in JavaScript
Lisk lets you write code in a programming language called JavaScript. And this is in my opinion one of the greatest advantages of Lisk.
Have a look at this image showing the fifteen most popular programming languages on GitHub:
JavaScript is leading here by far. It’s just very convenient and easy to use for developers. Many of them know it and use it on a daily basis. Now, when I think about mass adoption for Crypto, I’m pretty sure this is what Crypto needs. An easy to use programming language which enables and simplifies getting started in Crypto and Blockchain. And JavaScript is exactly that.
For example Ethereum uses its own programming language called Solidity for smart contracts. Solidity is influenced by languages like JavaScript and C++ but still different. That means as a developer you still need to learn Solidity first, before you can actually write your own smart contracts and deploy them to the Ethereum Blockchain. That would not be needed with Lisk. This could attract many curious developers who are interested in Blockchain but haven’t made a any contact yet.
The Tech
Just like with Ethereum you can create decentralized Apps (dApps) with Lisk. Still Ethereum and Lisk are generally speaking nothing alike. Whereas in Ethereum developer deploy code (smart contracts) to the Ethereum blockchain to execute, Lisk takes another approach and utilizes sidechains meaning developers create their own blockchain. That also means that someone could create a smart contract platform on a Lisk sidechain, for example.
A sidechain is a separate Blockchain that is still connected to its parent mainchain. This is great when it comes to interchangeability because tokens can easily be exchanged between main- and sidechains. Therefore LSK tokens will be needed to cover the transaction fees. Besides empowering the platform and ecosystem LSK can get use-cases for example as a payment for decentralised identity, storage or computation. Of course LSK will also be used for ICOs in the Lisk ecosystem. That means the more projects are built on Lisk and the more sidechains exist in the Lisk ecosystem, the more will LSK eventually come into value.
Back to mainchain and sidechains. Probably it is easier to visualize it like this. Imagine: The whole Lisk ecosystem is Lisk City. One house in this city could be an application. In the city there’s one main road going through the city (the mainchain) connected with some smaller streets and roads around it (sidechains). Contractors (developers) help this city to thrive and grow. Therefore they need a blueprint which is Lisk Core (more on Core later). Now developers can build their own houses (applications) in Lisk City using helpful tools created by Lisk. They can even create own tools to share (e.g. a hammer, a chainsaw etc.) which make it easier for other developers to build their houses.
Lisk Hub is the place where you access and send your LSK tokens, vote for delegates, register sidechains or create your own ICO. It comes with an explorer and will also function as a decentralized Exchange (dEx) in the future. After you have created your own token you can customize it how you want it to function and how the application should look like using Lisk Commander. If you don’t need your own token for your dApp you can also just use LSK, e.g. for payments. As mentioned, the great part about Lisk is that you write these dApps in JavaScript. That means you can use frameworks like for example React, a really popular framework developed by Facebook. Helpful developer tools are also on hand. You could even create an iOS or Android app. Lisk Developers can even help other Lisk developers by contributing modules, algorithms and scripts using Lisk Elements, a collection of libraries. Version 1.0.0 has just been released. And last but not least: Lisk Core. At the moment everybody is talking about it but what exactly is it? Core is basically the foundation of all the other components, the Lisk Sidechain Development Kit (SDK) and the whole Lisk ecosystem. It is now on the public testnet for some QA before actually bringing it to the mainnet. This should happen pretty soon.
The thing is that creating your own dApps, tokens or sidechains is not possible for the time being because the Lisk Sidechain Development Kit (SDK) has not been fully ‘released’ yet. Now, the SDK is actually not something that you just release on a specific date, it’s more like a collection of functioning components working together (all of the mentioned above). However, at the moment it is uncertain when all of this will be production ready on the mainnet and developers can actually start building on Lisk. However, it is said that after Core 1.0 overall development is supposed to speed up.
So, that and a few delays in development of the Lisk team led to some discontent investors and members in the community. This is also one of the reasons why Lisk decreased in price drastically (that and the bear market, of course). I think it’s important to bring to mind that this is a long game. Software development takes its time, bugs and all kinds of unexpected stuff come up on a daily basis and deadlines are actually really hard to meet. I personally also find it very questionable that a lot of people judge projects from the outside without having any background in IT, the daily challenges and thousands of setbacks developers face everyday. But that’s another story. That is also one of the reasons why many Software companies abolished traditional project management with explicit milestones and established agile development cycles using iterations and developing incrementally. It is just more or less impossible to estimate workload in huge IT development projects. Still, when deadlines are communicated you should obviously try to stick to them. If you don’t you will loose the investors’ trust. However it would be far worse if investors would actually loose their hard-earned money in form of valuable LSK tokens because of some kind of bug. I think that is also why the Lisk team is really cautious here and does a lot of testing / QA. Just some aspects to think about.
Yet it is really cool to see that projects like MADANA or Sapiens already decided to build on Lisk. Madana will be the first Lisk sidechain ICO and has just started whitelisting. By the way, a Lisk payment will get you an extra 10% MADANA tokens (PAX).
The Team
So, speaking of the team. At the moment Lisk consists of 51 people. Most of them are working as developers. Also you will find people working there in marketing, creative and operations.
What I really like about this page is that there’s a photo of every employee even with a short description of the person on the website. Speaking of transparency. This is just awesome in my opinion and a very strong move from a marketing perspective. Especially in Crypto, where trust is essential. Maybe let me add here: The Lisk Website is actually one of the best websites I have seen in a while (from a Design/UX and Usability perspective). On point. You want to attract new investors? Guess where they head first. Brilliant move. The same applies to their videos and images.
I think it would be too much to go more in depth about every employee but all in all when browsing through you can clearly see there are same smart minds working for Lisk. Plus, there are 10 different open positions on the website right now so the team is most likely to grow much more.
Delegated Proof of Stake
Lisk uses a so-called Delegated Proof of Stake System (DPoS). DPoS in general is a fast, decentralized and in general a very efficient model. Every Lisk holder can vote for up to 101 delegates. The delegates with the most votes are allowed to validate blocks and therefore forge LSK. So if there are malicious people threatening the Lisk ecosystem people could just vote them out.
Sounds like a great system, right? Unfortunately this system is kind of flawed and many community member criticize it. At the moment there are two huge forging pools (GDT pool and LiskElite) who basically are in charge of the whole network and could theoretically take over the whole Lisk blockchain (this is very, very unlikely). These pools distribute a small percentage of their block reward to their voters. This is calculated by voting weight, meaning the more LSK you have the more your votes count. Since those two pools are so powerful only few Lisk holders decide to vote for other delegates which would result in receiving less dividends from the delegates. A vicious cycle. On the other hand you also have to mention that many of the 101 delegates are actively working on improving Lisk and its ecosystem in many different ways (e.g. software, donations…).
Further development and conclusion
At the time of writing Core 1.0 is almost completely finished and already been released to testnet (Core 1.0.0-rc.2). So there is still some QA going on but this should be finished pretty soon. Great, so what comes after that? As far as I know Lisk hasn’t provided an actual roadmap for quite some time but still it’s pretty clear what comes after Core 1.0. Basically besides further development of all Lisk components (e.g. Core 1.2.) for increased stability there will be:
- Dynamic Fees
- Modularisation of Core
- Lisk Commander & Lisk Elements version 2.0
- Sidechains
- Decentralized Exchange (dEx)
After Lisk’s relaunch in Q1 of 2018 where they unveiled their new website, branding and client interface a lot of things became really transparent. Like for example when Lisk plans to spend its almost $100.000.000 USD. Well, looking at those amounts they must have huge plans. I don’t think it’s already a hundred percent clear or communicated how exactly the money will be spent but certainly you can make big moves with that kind of money.
Also Lisk is open-source which means you can have a look at their code in GitHub and see all the developments going on. Looking at their commits they are super active there which is important. Also the team is really communicative, active on Medium and Reddit and gives a lot of updates about current development progress. Also Lisk does have a really good documentation.
All in all it’s safe to say that Lisk is a huge and ambitious project with a great team and vision. Although some investors may have lost confidence I think we’re approaching new, important milestones which will turn the game around. Obviously there’s still a lot of development left to be done but with the release of Core 1.0 things should generally speed up. Although the idea of sidechains is not completely new it could offer a lot of advantages and I can easily see Lisk becoming THE blockchain platform of choice for developers and businesses to create their own dApps, tokens and sidechains. The market is a mess at the moment and basically everything is going own. Given that, even if Lisk announces the successful implementation of Core 1.0 in the next few days I don’t really expect a great run on Lisk. I can only assume that his will be delayed until the next (alt) bull run. I seriously don’t want to make any price predictions that are completely off because the market just behaves like a maniac. If Lisk can find mass adoption as a reliable blockchain platform with sidechains the future will likely be very bright. And surely this will eventually reflect in the price of LSK. If Lisk can deliver all of its promises I can absolutely see Lisk as a Top10 Crypto project in the future.
But don’t trust me. Do your own research and forge your own opinion about Lisk.
Epilogue
I love feedback. If you like the article I would really appreciate if you clap a few times, like it, comment on it, share it, all of the mentioned or just give me some feedback. If you didn’t like it or if you spotted some mistakes, for example, I would also really like to know that. Also if you think that something crucial is missing. So I can correct and/or update these things in this story and also to just consider that feedback in the next stories. Also I can add: I’m not a native English speaker. I still think this story is generally coherent. Also I like writing incrementally, so I will probably edit this story sometimes and add progress made, development and new stuff that came up etc.
If you want to read following articles, don’t hesitate to give me a follow on Twitter and Medium. There are lots of new stories yet to come.
I am not part of the Medium Partner Program so this review is, of course, absolutely free. However, if you would still like to support me I’ll just leave my addresses here.
LSK: 10460429104040564452L
ETH: 0xFa739054D1461a0Bb0cCB3cE5D1f136c35cF665e
BTC: 3FLJenjhVM5VmEndw8Hw1DqbDBiGKcNc33
