I’m writing this article to announce my resignation from Lightcurve.

I’ve been working at Lightcurve for about 2 years; most recently as lead developer on the P2P team. Since version 1, Lisk has been using my open source project SocketCluster which I have been working on in my spare time for 6 years.

I quit today because I want to help speed up development of the Lisk ecosystem.

For over a year, Lightcurve has adopted a strict roadmap-based and research-driven (LIP) approach to development. In my view, this approach was fine for some aspects of the project, but I was pushing for a more agile approach in other areas. Unfortunately, it proved impossible for me to do this whilst being employed at Lightcurve.

A few people from the community may already be familiar with or have contributed to some of my unofficial side-projects (these are side projects which I worked on in my own time outside of Lightcurve):

‘lisk-interchain’: A lightweight plugin to allow running a sidechain as a subnet in the Lisk network; the sidechain logic can be written as custom module which can be installed on any regular Lisk node with a couple of lines of code. Most of the mechanism which makes this feature possible is already part of the P2P layer which was shipped in Lisk core v2.1. ‘lisk-dex’: A decentralized exchange which uses a federated 2-way peg mechanism to allow tokens to be traded between Lisk and a sidechain in a trustless way (by sending funds to multi-signature wallets on either chain). The current implementation supports a decentralized order book with limit and market orders — From a trader’s perspective, it behaves similarly to a centralized exchange except that all orders are visible on-chain and are processed in a decentralized way. See the slides.

There is already a Proof of Concept sidechain running on testnet called ‘Capitalisk’ which is connected via the DEX. The sidechain runs on regular Lisk nodes as a subnet. It’s currently possible to purchase testnet Capitalisk (CLSK) tokens using testnet Lisk (LSK) without a centralized exchange. The Capitalisk sidechain can be easily installed on any Lisk node with a few lines of code. The project is essentially complete but could benefit from extra testing with the help of the community.

I will share a full tutorial in a separate post. If you would like to get involved or contribute, please send me an email using the address from my GitHub profile.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, feedback or Lisk-related ideas to discuss.

I want to thank colleagues from Lightcurve for being supportive of my decision. Also, thank you to the P2P team for doing a great job, being passionate about the work and delivering a great P2P library. Also, thank you to Max and Oliver for having given me this opportunity to work at Lightcurve.