History
Lisk started as a fork of Crypti with an ICO that raised 5.8 billion. At that time Lisk was the second most successful crypto crowdfund. On May 24, 2016 the main net went live and it became available for trading on major exchanges. Soon after going live, Lisk briefly became the second most popular cryptocurrency with a btc trading pair. Currently as I’m writing this Lisk is the 15th highest listed market cap weighing in at 3.2 billion.
Technology
Lisk’s goal is to be the first successful modular crypto currency platform catering to the world’s most popular programming language, Javascript. They want to accomplish this in three ways:
Lisk wants dApp development to be accessible to the existing, immense Javascript community consisting of app developers, web developers, and designers. They aim to make developing on blockchain as simple as creating a website.
Javascript has many preexisting tools which developers are familiar with and already use.
Javascript runs natively in the browser, meaning that any dApps developed on Lisk will be immediately available for use in whichever browser you currently use without any extensions or modifications.
In other words - Lisk’s decision to utilize Javascript enables greater adoption from both a developer and consumer standpoint.
Going back to Lisk’s modular design: this project's ‘modules’ serve as the basis of its design and construction. It allows anyone to use its ‘designing blocks’ to construct their own decentralized apps in a simpler manner than recreating each component from the ground up. Time is commodity in the developer community, and Lisk's ability to remove entry barriers is a huge incentive.
Basically, Lisk for programmers and developers is like Wordpress for the average person to create a website. Instead of wasting time writing complex functions, Lisk can be used to simplify the process by adding pre-made components similar to how plugins are used in Wordpress.
This ease of building, publishing, distributing & monetizing applications can all be accomplished with Lisk without sacrificing quality.
Aside from the choice of programming language, Lisk differs as a platform in its decision to implement sidechains. This would solve 3 issues that plague other platforms such as Ethereum and Bitcoin: network speed, security of the network, and protocol consensus.
SideChains
Sidechains are independent cryptographic ledgers(blockchains) that attach to the main block chain, but do not impact the speed or security of the main chain.
Lisk’s side chains are the the blockchain, as post it notes are to your textbook pages.
From a speed point of view, all the transactions for each dApp will be processed on its respective sidechain, alleviating congestion on the main chain. For anyone who has been around to witness the Ethereum ICO craze, or the influx from Crypto Kitties had quickly learned that the Ethereum network has speed and scalability issues. Lisk's sidechains are a resolution to that issue.
Security
There is also the plus side of enhanced security by isolation. The main chain and each sidechains are isolated from each other so if there are any security breaches (similar to Ethereum’s DOA back in the summer of 2016 where a dApp was hacked), these breaches would only affect the chain that the breach occurred on. Also, each sidechain defines its own data model, data storage and security model. Therefore, the failure of a sidechain has no impact on others.
On a protocol and consensus level, Lisk can stage protocol upgrades among sidechains. This would allow upgrades to be rolled out progressively which is safer and less risky than upgrading all networks at once.
So how are these side chains managed you ask? They’re secured by nodes hosted by delegates, 101 to be exact, and those delegates are elected by Lisk holders. They operate using the delegated proof of stake or (DPOS) consensus system. These delegates also forge new LSK with each block.
Consensus Protocol
People in the crypto community vote for the individuals they want to run the nodes that maintain the network. The people who get the most votes are call witnesses. And in the case of lisk the top 101 delegates or “witnesses” get paid for their service.
As the community grows, it gets harder and harder to remain a paid Witness due to increased competition. If a Witness stops doing a quality job of securing the network, people in the community can remove their votes, essentially firing him or her. Voting is always ongoing. This system works because it is able to flush out bad contributors and at the same time recognize new valuable members.
Fun fact: Former Eth core members joined Lisk’s team. On June 8 2016, Lisk CEO Max Kordek announced the addition of Charles Hoskinson (ex-CEO of Ethereum) and Steven Nerayoff (ex-advisor for Ethereum) as Senior Advisors of Lisk, to facilitate Product Development.
Currently on CoinGecko's overall ranking for the community, the project, and future possibilities of Lisk is number 15 placing it right below Tron and Dash.
Block Rewards
The amount of LSK forged by delegates dropped 20% a few months ago, from 5 LSK per block to 4 LSK per block, due to their “halving” event. Every year the amount of LSK forged per block will decrease by one until a minimum of 1 LSK forged per block, which will remain indefinitely.
SDK
A software development kit (SDK or devkit) is typically a set of software development tools that allows the creation of applications for many use cases but in this instance, for building on the Lisk platform operating system, or similar development platform. Along with this will come documentation on Lisk’s API as well. This is a big deal because this means that the average developer will now have tools to jump right into designing on the lisk platform.
Upcoming
The community had been long waiting the rebranding and the release of the SDK which was continually getting pushed back. However it is now planned for Feburary 20th in which they will be doing a live stream of the event in Berlin.
From their website:
The Relaunch Event is a major milestone in Lisk's marketing and development roadmap, which includes the rollout of our new brand identity, frontend design, dashboard and wallet. It also comes ahead of the release of the alpha-version of the Lisk SDK for blockchain applications.
Relauch
Cons
A major Issue I ran into was the delegate voting system. As I had touched on before you vote for 101 delegates, that means you allow them to represent you and forge new coins and stabilize the network. You get some income, and the delegates get some income, everyone one happy.
However it seems that some delegates were not content with that and thus have formed groups creating more market power for themselves. Right now the biggest delegates group is Elite which has 55 members. This group has made it a requirement for you to vote for everyone in the elite pool in order to receive rewards.
Recently Elite has been trying to promote new members who aren’t in the top 101, to be in the top. And obviously if you don’t vote for the new addition you won’t receive any payout from the group as a whole.
The next issue with this is they are only rewarding those who vote for them 25% of the lisk they forge, and from my research it seems Elite members also aren’t contributing to Lisk’s development. To put it into perspective some delegates are sharing upwards of 80% of the lisk they forge, contribute to Lisk’s development, and are building a fund to sponsor development of projects on the Lisk platform.
It’s a pretty crummy situation and I would really like to see them resolve it. Because outside of a few selfish individuals, the project is poised for success.
Opinion
I'm extremely excited for the Lisk re-branding. I have been holding Lisk since I made my original video back in November. Not to mention the SDK is finally getting released and that means the project will be more active, with more developers improving the ecosystem. I do honestly think this is a solid project, with realistic goals, and ability to accomplish what they've set out to do. 2018 is going to be a interesting year.
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