On 24th July, the new era for Lisk began with the launch of the Alpha SDK. This article highlights the main features and the instructions to start using the tool.

In this new phase the mission to enable the realization of decentralized, efficient, and transparent blockchain applications is on its way. In fact, the new Lisk SDK 2.1.0, officially announced in this blog post, will be a powerful tool available to developers. Moreover, the release celebrates the beginning of the Alpha SDK on the Lisk roadmap. Developers will be able to design their own proof-of-concept blockchain applications and their voice will be taken into account in the development of the SDK.

Today, Lisk changed. With the release of the Lisk SDK we are entering a new era for the project. I would like to congratulate and thank my whole team for achieving this huge milestone together with me and my great partner @Karmacrypto. ?? Without them Lisk would not be. ❤️ — Max Kordek (@MaxKordek) July 24, 2019



Regarding the architecture of the SDK, developers explained that it has been planned to be flexible, in order to fit a large number of blockchain application types. The story of the Lisk SDK started with the LIP 5 proposal, which was presented in this article, even if minor changes to the initial schedule have been made. Specifically, the system component has been designed as part of the application controller, in order to avoid having an inconsistent application condition spread across different modules within the application. In addition, the new concept of public versus private actions has been introduced, providing a higher level of security. This means that the first group of operations (remote procedure calls) can be executed from other machines on the Lisk network, while some others are limited to the local machine only.

The SDK offers the opportunity to customize the blockchain to suit specific purposes, including the change of protocol parameters and custom business logic. Developers can also establish their own custom transaction types, as an extension to the default set of transactions, among which you can find: Balance transfer (type 0), Second passphrase registration (type 1), Delegate registration (type 2), Delegate vote (type 3), Multisignature account registration (type 4). Initially, only four customized blockchain parameters are available (Block time, Epoch time, Block rewards and Block size), but in the future others will be added.

If you want to start building your application with the Lisk SDK, the recommended way is to install it using the NPM package, through the following single command:

If you need only a single functionality, you can also install a specific package. It is also possible to modify it, replicating the repository and building an own version of the Lisk SDK. All these possibilities are explained in the Lisk SDK documentation.

As already mentioned, the release concludes the “Architecture and Design” phase, starting the “Security and Reliability” one. Below, the new features that will be introduced in the next versions:

Lisk SDK 2.2.0: improvement of the existing codebase, in order to speed up the further development; Lisk SDK 2.3.0: introduction of peer selection and banning mechanism systems; Lisk SDK 3.0.0: switching from consensus to BFT algorithm, with the purpose of increasing security, ensuring blocks finality and much else.

Finally, it is useful to point out that, from now on, Lisk Core will be released separately from Lisk SDK in accordance with the following scheme: Lisk Core 2.1.0 release will include Lisk SDK 2.3.0 and Lisk Core 3.0.0 release will be directly based on Lisk SDK 3.0.0, including all development of previous versions of the Lisk SDK.

———————————————-

Lisk Magazine is a project supported by Lisk Italian Group and EliteX.

Support our work, vote for Lisk Magazine.