Lisk (LSK) became apart of the crypto space since 2016 and has built a blockchain that is known to be for sidechain and DApps. Being the #34 coin by market cap at the time of this writing, Lisk is looking to help with development in the blockchain industry, Lisk has mainly focused on the Javascript programming language for its blockchain applications.

Starting Lisk

Lisk was founded by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows in 2016 and is a fork of the Crypti blockchain. Shortly after the fork, Lisk onboarded former Ethereum staff with ex-CEO Charles Hoskinson and ex-advisor Steven Nerayoff as senior advisors for Lisk to help guide the project.

One of the many complications in the blockchain industry is the development of blockchain platforms since it only came into existence within the past decade. Helping developers get familiar with blockchain and having support for the most used programming language, Javascript. Ever since smartphones became apart of the majority of our everyday lives, developers have been dealing with centralized platforms of the app stores and have to deal with them taking a large percentage of their revenues and making it difficult for developers to make ends meet. This is where Lisk looks to make it more simple and fairer for developers to get a larger share of the revenue.

Along with making blockchain more accessible to developers, Lisk uses sidechains to help with the scalability issue of congested networks. The use of sidechains allows for high-volume transactions to be placed on a sidechain rather than to congest the main blockchain.

Sidechains also allow developers to customize their own consensus rules and create their own token to be able to sync to the main Lisk blockchain.

The Lisk team created Software Development Kits (SDKs) that focuses on 4 key parts:

Consensus algorithm Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS)

Back-end

Front-end

Sidechains

Being a DPoS blockchain, Lisk has 101 witnesses or delegates is what they call it that verify transactions and help keep the network secure.

The SDK allows developers to create blockchain services. Some examples are:

Smart contract execution as a service

Oracles as a service

Identity as a service

Decentralized hosting as a service

There have been changes since but you can read the original Whitepaper for more details.

Growth

Since the start of Lisk, they have managed to have many partnerships but one of the more known partnerships was with Microsoft and their Azure cloud service. However, Lisk seems to no longer have that partnership but has since partnered with many other businesses.

Just back in November 2019, Lisk became listed on the Kraken exchange still showing signs of growth and adoption.

Despite getting listed on more exchanges and having a solid backing, Lisk faced hard times like many other blockchain projects and dealt with layoffs and developers leaving in December 2019. A report mentions Co-Founder Max Kordek shared the news of the layoffs:

Today, at Lightcurve, we laid off 21 of our employees and terminated the contracts of three employees who were yet to join. This concludes the recent wave of terminations you may have observed. We are now ready to go completely dedicated into 2020 with a solid team of 31 individuals on the Lightcurve side -Bitcoinst

Interestingly, the Chinese government-backed institute Center for Information and Development (CCID) that ranks crypto projects released their 16th ranking but the first for 2020. On it, Lisk ranks #4 among the 37 on the list.

Visit here for the full list.

One of the bigger growth news for Lisk is the upcoming update to their blockchain that has some major changes. The Lisk 3.0 core launched its beta in February 2020 and the most major change is the consensus protocol that will be Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) instead of the current DPoS.

Other changes include:

New protocol features LIP0004: Introduce robust peer selection and banning mechanism This scalability and security improvement further refines the gossip-based flooding mechanism for blocks, transactions, and signatures to improve information propagation. It allows the Lisk peer-to-peer network to scale to an unlimited number of nodes and increases the robustness of the network and individual nodes. LIP0012: Remove redundant properties in transactions This scalability improvement removes redundant properties in transactions which makes them smaller in size. With the future introduction of byte-based blocks, it therefore allows for more transactions within one block and will also make them cheaper with the introduction of our new dynamic fee system. LIP0009: Mitigate transaction replay on different chains This security improvement binds transactions to specific chains by using unique chain identifiers. Today, this is important to not be able to replay Testnet transactions on the Mainnet. However, it’s also a requirement for future Lisk sidechains to not be able to replay sidechain transactions on the Mainnet or vice versa. LIP0014: Change consensus protocol to add block finality This security improvement is the biggest protocol improvement for this phase. It adds block finality to the Lisk blockchain through a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm. This will guarantee after a certain amount of time that a block can never be reverted. It’s a critical requirement for future Lisk sidechains. Further improvements Upgrade to NodeJS12 Adding support for the latest NodeJS version comes with speed and security improvements, as well as various new features for developers. Please refer to the NodeJS12 change log. Upgrade to Typescript 3.7 Adding support for the latest Typescript version comes with many new features for developers and various new type checks. Please refer to the Typescript 3.7 change log. Faster blocks transmission between peers This scalability improvement increases the transmission speed of blocks sent between individual nodes on the network. Do not include nonce when broadcasting transactions/signatures/blocks This scalability improvement removes nonces from being broadcasted which makes the required data being transmitted smaller and therefore the transmission more efficient. -Lisk Blog

Lisk has managed to stay competitive and be ranked the #34 coin by market cap. With seeing an all-time high roughly $30 per Lisk, they have faced the bear market as with many in the crypto market has and is currently seeing some gains in the market despite the recent crash over the virus outbreak and other factors. With the upcoming 3.0 upgrade, will Lisk be able to turn things around in the current market and push through to see the prices it once had? We will have to wait and see how the economy recovers from the current pandemic but could be one to keep an eye on.

Just remember, this is not investment advice and do your own research.