Lisk- Relaunch & the road ahead
Blockchain may still well be in its early stages but with individuals, businesses, and even governments today turning into advocators of the technology, it holds a promising future. Decentralised applications (DApps), built leveraging the Blockchain technology, promise a paradigm shift akin to the early days of the internet. These DApps could lead to a global network of systems communicating with each other with no central government or entity owning it, while running without instances of fraud. To keep up with the growing demand that will soon arise there is a need for robust platforms that allow users to create and deploy these DApps. Click here to read our previous article where we discussed about DApps and the two popular platforms used to create and deploy them- ethereum & Lisk.
Lisk launched initially in May of 2016 with the release of their pre-sale token (LSK), which at the time was the second-highest ICO to have taken place. Lisk has been one of the most awaited projects in the industry with one of the largest community of developers. Lisk has been active in implementing changes to deliver to their commitment of quality. To that end, Lisk rolled out their new brand identity, frontend design, dashboard, and wallet on 20th of February 2018 at Berlin’s Westhafen Event & Convention Center, Germany. The much anticipated even is a major milestone in Lisk’s marketing and development roadmap and saw 500 attendees with around 10,000 tuned in to the watch the livestream of the event. In this article we look at some of the highlights of the event, starting with the reveal of the new Lisk logo.
Opening by Max Kordek
Max Kordek, C.E.O. & co-founder of Lisk commenced the event with the opening speech:
“Blockchain is one amazing technology. Applied, it offers so many great opportunities to benefit our centralized world. However, there’s one problem: It’s not easy to apply this technology. Blockchain technology could be used in order to remove borders, to empower future infrastructures, or to bring transparency. Because of the fact that this technology is not very accessible nowadays, because you need to know many different complex fields like cryptography, peer-to-peer technology, or game theory, Oliver Beddows (co-founder & CTO)and I started this whole journey. We established the Lisk Foundation in Switzerland with the goal to make this technology open for everyone in the world.”
Rebranding & new identity by Christian Vatter
Taking over the session from Max was Christian Vatter. Vatter is a marketing psychologist and the founder of Rlevance, the consultancy that is credited with the rebranding of Lisk. He went on to talk about the process of ideation & execution behind Lisk’s rebranding and their new identity. Rlevance, focusing on a human-centered approach, went deep into understanding Blockchain technology, the concerns of the end-users, and the inherent strengths of the Lisk platform. To create the value proposition of Lisk, they brought in an expert panel of leading minds in the blockchain industry to consult on various topics.
In addition, Rlevance opened up a Slack channel to get feedback directly from a community of over 2000 developers and the field research yielded 3 key insights:-
- Lisk is a reliable and scalable platform to run blockchain applications.
- Lisk makes creating blockchain applications more accessible
- Lisk wants to bring the benefits of blockchain applications to everyone.
Thus, the Lisk value proposition was created.
Lisk understands that to truly enable Blockchain creators means to educate and equip developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs alike. In order to deliver on this promise, Lisk intends to:-
- Make it easy to build applications
- Provide essential tools to manage apps
- Educate users about the topic, platform, and tools
- Inspire them with great use cases, and
- Construct and maintain a solid and scalable infrastructure.
Brand Improvements by Thomas Schouten
The marketing lead of Lisk, Thomas Schouten then went on to talk about the progression of the rebranding process. Thomas spoke about the importance of brand consistency and how it seeped through from the inital stages of brand strategy led by Rlevance to the design changes as implemented by award-winning German design agency Taikonauten, and finally to the code & the core product itself.
He announced the new product names and icons for their 4 powerful tools:-
- Lisk Core remained unchanged
Lisk core is the tool for advanced technical users who want to access Lisk’s main network blockchain data, secure the network infrastructure or attain delegate forging access. - Lisk JS renamed to Lisk Elements
Lisk Elements is a collection of libraries, such as the shared cryptography, an API representation, transaction logic for local signing and important constants for the ecosystem. - Lisky is now Lisk Commander
Lisk Commander is a Command Line Interpreter to the Lisk Core APIs that will in the future support bootstrapping and managing sidechains. - Lisk App became Lisk Hub
Lisk Hub, an all-in-one solution to manage Lisk ID, access and send LSK tokens, as well as vote for delegates. It combines functionality from Lisk’s former wallet and blockchain explorer. In the future, Lisk Hub will feature a DEX (decentralized exchange), sidechain registration and the ability to launch your own ICO. (Wow!)
Out with the old, in with the new
Schouten then went on to take the audience through a visual tour of their new website. Here we take a look at their old homepage,
and the new, improved, and gorgeous new https://lisk.io.
The next major reveal was a feature that excited viewers both online & offline- the Lisk ID, available on the Lisk Hub.
Lisk ID, previously known as the Lisk App is a secure, design-driven, experience on creating a unique user ID to access the Lisk wallet. The user ID is visually generated and represented, with instructions that teach users to store the private keys to their wallets, and go a step further to verify that users have indeed stored it securely.
The Lisk Academy by Jacob Kowalewski
Marketing manager Jacob Kowalewski then introduced The Lisk academy. The academy is an attempt to educate people from different backgrounds about Blockchain technology and its use-cases. Again, design plays an integral role in creating this interactive experience of absorbing highly technical knowledge. The Lisk academy has two fundamental areas:-
Blockchain Basics that covers fundamental aspects of the Blockchain through four chapters:-
Chapter 1- Blockchain explained
Chapter 2- Technologies of blockchain
Chapter 3- Values of blockchain
Chapter 4- Blockchain use cases
Blockchain Business on the other hand covers the fundamentals of implementing Blockchain technology in your company with the following chapters:-
Chapter 1- Blockchains uses in business
Chapter 2- The Blockchain Business
Chapter 3- Cryptocurrencies
Chapter 4- ICOs
The aim of the Lisk Academy is to increase awareness, loyalty, understanding, and consequently adoption of Blockchain technology. The conversation nowadays is more about the volatilities in cryptocurrency prices, and Lisk aims to shift the conversation to Blockchain, and promote the Blockchain ecosystem. The Lisk Academy aims to add several features in the future as they build their community.
Development Panel Discussion
The session moderated by Thomas Schouten looked into the technical developments and improvements implemented into the Lisk product.
Lisk with the much awaited release of Core 1.0.0 has been a trending topic on Reddit and Oliver Beddows goes on to explain why:-
“First and foremost, we wanted to learn from our mistakes and make Lisk fit-for-purpose as a truly scalable and accessible Blockchain development platform. With that in mind, our motivations were to confront some of these issues head on. This meant redesigning some of the key components of the Lisk core which we felt in their previous forms would be detrimental towards building a successful platform. After numerous brainstorms, code review tests and a bit of salt searching, we faced upto some pretty harsh realities and came up with an immediate set of goals.”
The following statistics on Core 1.0.0. were also revealed:
Iker Alustiza explained that after much research and feedback, Lisk plans to change their current fee system and implement a “scalable and dynamic fee system.” He went on to explain that a new address generation system would be implemented, that would be sidechain-ready and in the process it would incorporate the following features:-
- Higher entropy
- Scalable to millions of addresses
- Increased usability and security
- Shared cryptography
Will Clark is working part of a team of developers working on two developer facing products- Lisk Elements and Lisk Commander. He goes on to explain about the two platforms.
Lisk Elements
Lisk Elements as we mentioned earlier is a Javascript Libary that gives developers access to Lisk related functionalities. The main focus is on functionality in the following key areas:-
- Transactions
- API
- Constants
- Cryptography
- Passphrases
It is in JavaScript and hence allows for both front-end and back-end functionalities.
Lisk Commander
The Command Line Interface (CLI) provides a basic set of commands that all developers could use while interacting with the Lisk network along with a clean text-interface. The Lisk Commander offers an interactive mode for manually verifying the code or one-off tasks, and a non-interactive mode for automating tasks that allows Lisk Commander to be used in combination with other tools. It will enable developers to generate their own sidechain that can essentially function as a cryptocurrency, complete with its own incentivised token.
Lisk Financials Overview
C.E.O Max took over the stage once again and went on to provide transparency into the Lisk Foundations’ updated financial overview. The breakdown revealed a total of 300 million Swiss Francs (2,093 Crore INR) worth of holdings in various cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies.
In 2017, the entire Lisk project was developed with only 5 million Swiss Francs (34.6 Crore INR). With the current holdings of the Lisk Foundation, they have forecasted increased spending for 2018. In Max’s words “it’s going to be insane.”
Open Source Initiative
In order to improve on the Lisk infrastructure and software quality, Lisk has connected with qJon Gros-Dubois & Vitaly Tomilov, project leads of open source libraries SocketCluster & PgPromise, respectively. In line with their recent initiative to sponsor open source project, both project founders have joined the Lisk HQ team to continue working on these libraries.
Conclusion
The event concluded with Max inviting, on stage, all the team members and service providers who were integral with their contributions to the Lisk rebranding process.
Lisk has always been about quality and the event is another testament to the fact. With big plans, a team committed to delivering it, and ample funding too, Lisk is a rare occurrence for a start-up venturing into a new industry. With every new initiative that Lisk steps into, whether it is their product or brand, it has come out better and more promising. We cannot wait to start tinkering with the Lisk platform, and will tell you all about it here.
For those interested, you can watch the complete event here.
