Historically, we have seen that developing your blockchain is long-winded and difficult. At Lisk, we are deploying the principle of slow, steady, secure and are following a research first approach. For 2020, we have challenged ourselves with the question of how we can speed up our development time as much as possible, while at the same time, not sacrificing our principles or changing our research first approach.

We have analysed our situation and came up with two strategies on how to speed up our development. All adjustments only affect Lisk Core and not the Lisk SDK. Please note, in order to fully understand this blog post, it's important to understand our protocol roadmap first with its different phases.

Strategy #1: Quality assurance only up to Betanet with a follow-up security audit

The single most time-intensive task with every new major Lisk Core candidate is its quality assurance (QA), especially because the next phases all require hard forks. It takes at least one month to bring a major version from Alphanet to Betanet and at least another two months to launch it on Mainnet. Therefore, we decided that we will perform the QA for the Security and Reliability, Network Economics and Network Consensus phases up to Betanet only. For each new phase we will recreate a new betanet.

Once the Network Longevity phase is implemented we will quality assure the corresponding Lisk Core candidate up to Testnet and conduct an external security audit which ensures that the same security standards are kept as before. Afterwards we release it to Mainnet as a single major update, including all features from the previous phases. This consolidates all required hard forks to just one and minimizes the amount of backwards compatibility work.

Strategy #2: Network Economics and Network Consensus will be developed in one go

The Network Economics and Network Consensus phases are introducing the community's most-wanted features to Lisk, i.a. a new dynamic fee system and a new DPoS consensus algorithm. In comparison to the Security and Reliability phase which introduces a novel BFT consensus algorithm to the Lisk protocol, these two phases are still quite time intense to implement but definitely not as complex. Therefore, we have decided to implement them at the same time to save us from one whole quality assurance cycle and one further betanet.

The Lisk SDK will continue to be released after each phase

It's important to note that we will continue to release each major version of the Lisk SDK together with updated documentation. All major versions of the Lisk SDK will be usable to develop proof of concept blockchain applications.

In fact, we have just started with the development of Lisk SDK 4.0.0 which implements the Network Economics and Network Consensus phases.

Confusion around Lisk SDK stages and Lisk Core candidates

We have observed that there is some confusion around the terminology (Alpha, Beta, RC, Production) we are using for the Lisk SDK stages and Lisk Core candidates.