Introducing Lisky - Command Line Tool

Today we are launching our new command line tool, Lisky. Lisky aims to be a low entry point and the most convenient tool for developers who are looking for an efficient way of coding with the Command Line Interface (CLI). With Lisky, it is easier and quicker to plugin new commands in the CLI than building a Guided User Interface (GUI) around every command. This will facilitate delegates, node operators, contributors to the Lisk codebase, developers using Lisk’s infrastructure, and anyone else who’s interested to make use of Lisk’s functionality from the command line with ease.

Lisky 0.1.0 — First release
Since the early releases of Lisk Core, we’ve been working on separating logical components of functionality into distinct packages. Lisky will allow you to communicate with a remote or local node and carry out Lisk-related functionality using an interactive or non-interactive command line tool. From today, you can use three commands:

get (to get information on accounts, addresses, blocks, delegates or transactions)
list (same as get, but more than one at a time)
set (to set configuration variables, e.g. to use the testnet or for json output)

Going forward we’ll be adding more commands to provide a comprehensive suite for all your Lisk-related needs. We’re already making progress with the next minor version, which will add commands for processing transactions, creating accounts and delegates among other things.

Lisky makes use of one of our other projects, lisk-js, and is built on Vorpal, which makes it easy to write commands as plugins. If you’d like to see a command added to Lisky, let us know — or better yet, write it yourself and submit a pull request!

Installation instructions and further details can be found in the GitHub repository and on our documentation site.

Original Blog Post

Since January of 2017, the Lisk team has grown from three team members to more than fifteen team members. With the increase in team members also came an increase in productivity, releasing more than 10 version updates to the Lisk Core repository. We are a diverse group of young talented people with over ten different nationalities. We are still growing and are actively looking for talent around the world to join our amazing Blockchain platform.

We’re looking for highly motivated individuals who have great interest in Blockchain technology. We’re building a strong diverse team of curious creative people who want to find a purpose in their work and support each other in the process. We prioritize quality and take our time to make sure we get it just right. If you’re interested in joining our ambitious team check out our open positions:

Development
Back End Developer — Primary role would be to help develop and maintain the Lisk Core and upcoming Lisk SDK product lines.
DevOps Engineer — Assist the Lisk project in configuring and orchestrating its entire development infrastructure.
Back End QA Engineer — Advanced knowledge of Node.js and PostgreSQL, who can help the Lisk project achieve the very highest standards in code quality, performance and security.

Non-Development
Marketing and Communications — Help drive the ideation, development and execution of marketing and communications strategies for Lisk.
HR Manager — Responsible for the hiring process of Lisk alongside resolving conflicts and ensures planning, monitoring, and appraisal of employee work results.
Designer / Illustrator — Tasks include designing infographics, illustrations, icons, logos, UI/UX, banners and more, to help us reach Lisk’s ambitious objectives.
Office Manager / Executive Assistant / Bookkeeper — Manage the office space, keep an organized book/accounting and assist the co-founders.

Original Blog Post

Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of Lisk Nano 1.0.0, marking the first major release for a Lisk product. Lisk Nano 1.0.0 is supported on macOS, Windows 7/8/10 and all distributions of Linux. Lisk Nano offers greater flexibility for the end user to select their desired network or node. This means that public nodes are far more important to the network than they were before. Desktop notifications are also present in this release, making it much easier for users to know when their balance has changed.

Delegate Registration and Second Passphrase
With Lisk Nano 1.0.0, users now have the ability to register a their Lisk account as a delegate.


Additionally, a transactional support has been added to allow users to register second passphrase. Enabling second passphrase is the best way to keep your account secure and we highly recommend using one. Note: DO NOT misplace your first or second passphrase as this will result in losing access to your Lisk Account.

Voting Interface and Forging Center
One remarkable enhancement to Lisk Nano is the addition of the Voting Interface. This section replaces the existing web wallets functionality and enhances the features that the web wallet used to serve. The Voting Interface provides users the ability to vote for the Delegates who secure the underlying Lisk network. If you’re interested in learning more about voting, visit the voting section of the Lisk Delegate Handbook.

Also, the forging center was inspired by the Web Wallet (lisk-ui) as the primary landing page for delegates. This functionality was completely recreated using the existing web wallet as a template.

Signing and Verifying Messages
Finally, Lisk Nano offers an all new feature that allows an end user to sign and validate messages cryptographically. It can be used for escrow, validate important messages or announcements, proof of ownership and many more cases. For the more technical readers, for signing we are using the EdDSA family, specifically Ed25519.

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release.

• Isabella Dell (Isabello)
• Vít Stanislav (slaweet)
• Ali Haghighatkhah (reyraa)
• Yashar Ayari (yasharAyari)
• Aleksey (alepop)

Original Blog Post

Financial Report — April 2017
With the successful establishment of the Lisk Foundation in Zug, we are publishing Financial Reports on a monthly basis.

As of the 26th June 2017 at 5pm CEST, the Lisk Foundation controls the following fiat and cryptocurrency assets for on-going operations and long-term storage:

• 1,057,424.89 CHF
• 1,084,620.93 EUR
• 299,949.77 USD
• 9,488.80929344 BTC
• 4,363,283.33535737 LSK
• 34,848,029,663,160 bytes

Totalling: ~60,000,000 CHF (subject to very volatile markets)

Additionally, the Lisk Foundation holds the following assets for bounties and advisers, totalling over 10,000,000 CHF:

3,863,133.07211678 LSK (Bounties)
761,745.87898046 LSK (Advisers)

Currency conversions
The Lisk Foundation is handling multiple currencies such as CHF, EUR, USD and various cryptocurrencies. The accounting and our financial reports are all done in CHF.
In April 2017 the Lisk Foundation didn’t exchange any BTC for fiat currencies.

Monthly Expenditures
In April 2017 the Lisk Foundation spent approximately 88,179.10 CHF for all operations. Below you can find an approximate breakdown of the expenses for April. Please note, payments to the lightcurve GmbH are being executed every quarter only and are not included.

• Business: 11,429 CHF
• Strategic & creative rebranding: 45,000 CHF
• PR: 7,007 CHF
• Marketing: 3,688.50 CHF
• Legal: 21,054.60 CHF

Original Blog Post

Today we have released Lisk Core 0.9.0 to the Lisk main network. From a high level, this release brings many performance improvements, including the initial implementation of API caching, revisions to the code base and testing methodology changes.

Memory Optimizations and Logging Improvements
In this release, management of logs has been enhanced, with console logging disabled by default. Following those enhancements, the memory footprint has been improved by reducing the amount of duplicate libraries loaded per module. Finally, timestamp related activities are now more flexible, directly improving nearly all aspects of Blockchain interaction and performance.

Caching and future proofing
A commonly requested feature for Lisk core was to implement Redis to provide API caching functionality. API caching is the process of storing responses that are frequently requested so they do not have to be regenerated. This should result in commonly run queries returning much quicker. The usage of this cache will be extended in the future as to enable multiple nodes to share the same state and provide load balancing to multiple NodeJS processes.

Jenkins, Continuous Integration
Testing is valuable to ensure the code always performs the same actions the same way. In the past, Travis-CI was used to perform our Continuous Integration testing. However, the rate of development has greatly exceeded the capacity and performance Travis-CI offers, and therefore the CI testing was moved to a more robust Jenkins-CI deployment. With Jenkins-CI, the full test suite for Lisk Core runs in just over 20 minutes, allowing Lisk Core to be tested faster than ever.

Refactoring Efforts
Expanding on the efforts of previous releases, Lisk Core 0.9.0 offers some significant refactoring work. The primary focus of this refactoring work was on Blocks Processing, which went from a single monolithic module, to being broken into five submodules (api, chain, process, utils, verify). These submodules improve both code quality and readability as each submodule is responsible for appropriate actions.

Summary
Lisk 0.9.0 provides the bridge for 1.0.0 by improving code quality and readability, management of logs, implementing Redis and providing a solid foundation for continuous integration. The Lisk Foundation and the Lightcurve team are proud to bring this release out for the public to use. Special thanks to Ruben Callewaert (5an1ty) for his contributions with Lisk Docker. A complete list of changes can be seen in the release log on GitHub. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.

Original Blog Post

Tokensummit 2017 through the eyes of a non-developer

After three consecutive days at Consensus, it was time to get ready for the next conference of the week: Tokensummit 2017. The timing couldn’t have been better as both events were held in the same week. Many attendees of Consensus could just stay longer in New York and attend both. On the evening before the start of Tokensummit 2017, a pre-event was organised where Max Kordek and myself attended. This event facilitated meetings with the speakers and organizers. Although the location of the pre-event was quite fancy, the audience of Tokensummit was clearly more informal and less corporate than what we had seen during Consensus.


Next morning, the sunny weather had been replaced by rain while we were heading towards the auditorium of the New York University. The first edition of Tokensummit was clearly sold-out. Rumour was that tickets were sold way above normal price and that people without ticket gathered at the Starbucks around the corner, organising their own mini conference. Tokensummit was mostly about panel discussions featuring over 40 experts and 15 sessions interrupted by short breaks and lunch. The Blockchain experts elaborated on topics such as business models, legal and governance, Initial Coin Offerings (ICO), token funds and future predictions.


Emphasis on Blockchain use cases
Organizer and venture capitalist William Mougayar kicked off by saying that the focus of Tokensummit would be on the businesses behind cryptocurrencies. Co-organizer Nick Tomaino (Runa Capital, The Control) added that token valuation is the main interest of traders outside the Blockchain space but that most people attending Tokensummit are aiming to benefit from long-term success of the industry. However, a small question round revealed that nearly everybody in the audience held cryptocurrencies, but only a few held them for their utility or use cases.


Talks on ICOs
According to panellist Brian Lio (Smith + Crown), the amount raised during ICOs in 2017 has already outperformed 2016, including seed and Series A venture funding. Alex Sunnarborg (CoinDesk) added that currently every single crypto project in the top 100 has a valuation of over $10M, which is remarkable. In contrast to ICOs, receiving traditional seed and Series A funding is quite difficult as it requires start-ups to display traction and revenue streams. With ICOs as new funding mechanism, more projects have access to money while the public has more opportunities to participate in projects with great potential. However, the comparison with traditional VC funding is not completely valid. Sid Kalla (Smith + Crown) pointed out that the differentiating factor of using Blockchain technology also asks for a different way of funding. He said that those projects generally need an ICO just for distribution. For most projects, the broad distribution of their tokens is a necessity for the network to succeed. Those projects wouldn’t even consider giving VCs a substantial number of tokens in return for funding. Although I agree with his reasoning, fair distribution is unfortunately not always the case. Driven by massive ROI, we see a trend where more and more venture capitalists want a piece of that pie. Most (private) ICO participants simply don’t have the financial power to pay for high transaction fees to compete with huge investors. The result is that many (smaller) investors are excluded and a broad distribution fails. One solution could be a capped amount one person can invest, which raises other challenges to tackle such as people using multiple wallets at a time and conflicts with private investor deals.


Pitching sessions
Spread over two sessions, several well-known projects such as Aragon pitched their concepts. Others took the opportunity to campaign for their upcoming ICO, including Civic, Tezos and 0x project. Interesting fact is that Tezos, like Lisk, is running a delegated proof-of-stake consensus. The big announcement of the day came from outside the Blockchain space. Chat application Kik with over 300 million users revealed their plans to launch a custom token. This is a great example of how tech companies can utilize Blockchain technology and accelerate the adoption of this technology by the public.


Debate
Towards the end, fireside chats were held to recap and reflect. Nick Tomaino and William Mougayar went into debate with respectively Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures). Wilson made clear that ICOs are not just a way of initially funding a company, but that the token is also the native monetization model of the business. He added that if a project is doing well, the utility value of the network goes up and as a result the token value would rise. In other words, start-ups might give away a lot of their tokens in return for initial funding, but the small number of tokens they keep should increase substantially in value over time, incentivising the founders to make the project a success. For Lisk, this is definitely the case. The future potential of the Lisk project makes us sell Bitcoins to finance operations rather than LSK tokens. Wilson concluded:



Although the day was long and intense, most were still filled with energy and inspiration to continue exchanging thoughts after the event in a bar close by. Our stay abroad gave us great new insights and inspiration to continue building on the Lisk project. For me personally, both conferences contributed to my steep learning curve since I entered the Blockchain space. Once more, it became clear to me that Blockchain technology has great potential. Together with the rest of Lisk, it is my task to accelerate the adoption of Blockchain technology by providing the right tools and support to enable developers to create stunning Blockchain applications that soon will provide value for millions of people across the globe.

Original Blog Post

It's very difficult to compare Lisk Delegates (DPOS) to that of BTC mining (POW). While I can understand the analogy, choosing a Delegates is a democratically process and thus they are heavily involved within the community. A delegate position comes with far more responsibility than many people believe. DPOS and POW are nothing alike, and they should not be compared; there's way too much social behavior involved within DPOS that does not matter for POW.

Community Q&A Youtube Livestream — Meet the Developers!

On April 28th from 7:00 to 8:00PM CEST, members of the Lisk Foundation and employees of the lightcurve GmbH working on the Lisk platform will livestream a community Q&A.

In order to submit questions to our community meeting, head over to https://www.sli.do/ and use the event code #Lisk. Make sure to tag every question with the name of the person it’s directed to. We’re excited to have several of the developers working on the Lisk Platform:

• Max Kordek — President of the Lisk Foundation
• Joel Fernandez — Chief Operating Officer @ lightcurve GmbH
• Isabella Dell — System Architect @ lightcurve GmbH
• Ali Haghighatkhah — Developer and Lisk Nano Guru @ lightcurve GmbH
• Tobias Schwarz — Developer and Lisk-js Mastermind @ lightcurve GmbH
• Vit Stanislav — Developer and Lisk Nano Guru @ lightcurve GmbH

If you’re curious about blockchain technology, or wish to know more about the Lisk Platform then this is the perfect event for you. Here’s a link to the last two live streamed community meetings we’ve held:

• Lisk Community Meeting — Youtube Q&A — 01
• Lisk Community Meeting — Youtube Q&A — 02

Lisk is a blockchain applications platform that will enable its users to build applications from the ground up in JavaScript. The decentralized platform will enable the deployment, distribution and monetization of sidechains onto the Lisk blockchain. The Lisk network is operated using a highly efficient Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus model, which is secured by democratically-elected delegates. The cryptocurrency underpinning the Lisk platform is called LSK.

We hope you will find the time to attend. See you there!

Original Blog Post

Subscribe to Lisk Newsletter

Subscribe to Lisk Subreddit

Following up on the large improvements found in Lisk-JS 0.3.0, the Lisk Foundation is proud to release Lisk-JS 0.4.0 along with Lisk Nano 0.2.0.

Lisk Nano 0.2.0 — A big refactoring
Lisk Nano has been our lite client for individuals who are interested in transferring LSK without hosting a node of their own. In this release we have made some significant advances in robustness within the application. This includes some new highly sought after features, such as the ability to send all funds and the display of pending transactions from the blockchain. Additionally, we now have a comprehensive set of automated tests to verify all functionality works as expected between each new release.
The most important change is a big refactoring which prepares Lisk Nano for its first major release due soon. While this is an invisible change, it lays the foundation for the drastic changes Lisk Nano currently undergoes. Most notably, the switch to a fully fledged desktop client for the Lisk network.

Lisk-JS 0.4.0 — More features and adding the missing bits
Lisk Nano and Lisk-JS are becoming tightly coupled projects, due to Nano’s reliance on Lisk-JS for all of its transactional and peer API functionalities. The improvements found in Lisk-JS 0.4.0 are very useful for developers looking to create their own tools or wallets, and as such the library now supports both promises and callbacks, depending on code style.
Lisk-JS now also includes the opportunity to encrypt local messages using the account secret and the recipient account publicKey. Many of the API endpoints have been refactored in a more logical way to support developers as well. Lastly, the only missing part of the API until now — the multi-signature functionality — is implemented and ready to use. This marks an important step towards higher security for entity owned funds.

Testing 1. 2. 3.
Following up with new features we have vastly improved our test suite for both Nano and Lisk-JS, following the same testing standards as Lisk Core. This includes the integration of Travis Continuous Integration to test every change automatically, the implementation of unit tests and validation of test coverage using Coveralls. Testing all of the features is extremely important to provide a stable and secure product that will perform as expected. Finally, we have also added ESLint to automatically verify code compliance with ECMAScript 2015 standards and prepare for the migration to ECMAScript 2016.

GPLv3
One final thing of note for these releases is that we are moving from The MIT License to the GPLv3 license. While this has no direct impact on the code itself, it is important to properly license our code in a way that the Lisk Foundation receives recognition on its open-sourced products. Code prior to this release will remain MIT licensed but going forward from Lisk Nano 0.2.0 and Lisk-JS 0.4 all new code will fall under GPLv3. If you wish to know more about the differences between the GPL and MIT licenses, please read the article: GPL vs. MIT: Which License to Use.

Whats next?
Lisk Nano is set to become our primary client for sending and receiving LSK transactions securely. We understand that it doesn’t cover all of the cases for usage yet, such as voting or multi-signature transactions. These features are coming in a subsequent release and will ultimately replace Lisk UI (used by the web wallet).
We are excited to release Lisk Nano 0.2.0 for everyone to enjoy and even more excited for the release of Lisk-JS 0.4.0 for developers. If you would like to download a copy of Lisk Nano, you can do so on our Downloads page.

The official release notes for Lisk Nano and Lisk-JS are available here:

Lisk Nano 0.2.0
Lisk JS 0.4.0

As always, anyone looking to get immediate updates on our development releases can subscribe to our newsletter.

Original Blog Post

This Financial Report could help you out.

Lisk 0.8.0 has been released, bringing more performance improvements and bug fixes. For this release, we’ve put even more work into database optimization, refining the API layer and resolving some difficult bugs. Following are more details on the changes, enjoy!

The Little Things
As with each successive release it is our pleasure to report a number of bugs that have been squashed. These bugs range from the minor misnamed and deprecated endpoint for the dApps API, to the application listening before it is ready and finally the rare but major nullification of the configuration file. These are just a small list of bugs that were resolved, we know that this list will shrink with successive releases.

Performance
We have also improved the performance of some heavily used database tables, particularly, `trs_list` view has been refactored and now provides much better performance, completely ironing out inefficiencies which cropped up in prior releases. Additionally, a `round_fees` table has been introduced to collect transaction fees awarded to delegates for each round. The new memory table brings performance improvements and much greater data flexibility for historical lookups on fee allocations.
In previous releases, it took up to 120 seconds of not receiving a block from the network to begin pulling fresh blocks from a peer. Now, nodes synchronize blocks after 20 seconds of not receiving new blocks, meaning that lagging peers catch up more often and much faster than before.

Modularity
While efforts toward scalability are ongoing, 0.8.0 brings a much needed step in the right direction. Under 0.8.0 all existing API’s have been extracted into their own modules so that future developments to the Lisk API are far easier to implement.
The binary builds also received some modularity/scalability improvements. We have moved away from Forever as the process manager and replaced it with PM2. PM2 offers much greater flexibility and control of the node process with some performance monitoring features and the required modularity to easily support multiple Lisk processes.

Lisk UI
A large number of bug fixes have been applied to the user-interface component of the Lisk client. The fixes include improved responsiveness on mobile devices, better feedback when placing votes, a more accurate sync progress indicator, the proper removal of user data on logout, and a performance fix related to the display of forging statistics. All of these fixes should help provide a better experience for users awaiting the planned Lisk Nano 1.0.0 release, that will eventually replace Lisk UI as the main user-interface for Lisk.

GPLv3
One final thing of note for these releases is that we are moving from The MIT License to the GPLv3 license. While this has no direct impact on the code itself, it is important to properly license our code in a way that the Lisk Foundation receives recognition on its open-sourced products. Code prior to this release will remain MIT licensed but going forward from Lisk 0.8.0 all new code will fall under GPLv3. If you wish to know more about the differences between the GPL and MIT licenses, please read the article: GPL vs. MIT: Which License to Use.

Summary
Lisk 0.8.0 yields significant performance gains through faster syncing, more efficient use of the database, and greater stability through the resolution of some bugs, continuing to improve upon the solid foundation established by previous releases. This release, along with the planned minor release of 0.9.0, lays the basis for our first major release, Lisk v1.0.0. A complete list of changes can be seen in the release log on GitHub. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.

Original Blog Post

During the past weeks, we have been refining and improving the way we communicate to our community. On November of last year, we published a blog post explaining some changes which improved communications by moving repetitive blog posts such as weekly summaries, community meetings, development updates and other events to the Lisk forums. After months of communicating through this setup we noticed it could be done better; having weekly updates and monthly community meeting summaries on the forums felt impersonal and once again, repetitive. Therefore, after receiving community feedback and having an internal team dialogue we’ve decided to improve upon our current way of communicating.

Lisk Chat Simplified
One of the first changes to streamline communications was to remove channels from the Lisk Chat as to focus efforts in several key channels (#announcements, #development, #general, #mainnet, #off-topic, #testnet and #trading). This was done to have a more streamlined approach towards open conversations and to make it easier for our team members to keep track of the conversations. The Lisk Chat is based on Rocket Chat — an open sourced online chat solution — where the Lisk community can have conversations with members of the team, so come join us!

Lisk Blog Refined
Moving forward, we believe the best way to communicate our advancements are through well written blog posts which will be re-distributed through our newsletter. These blog posts highlight different facets of the Lisk project and are being published by individuals working directly on it — this provides a personal experience for the community reading the updates. Furthermore, re-focusing communications through the Lisk Blog and the Lisk Newsletter allows us to have a wider reach on the community, specifically with new incoming members.

Lisk Subreddit Focused (Lisk Forums Deprecated)
The Lisk Chat offers the community a platform for direct conversations within themselves and with the people working on the Lisk Platform. However, interactions and important conversations on a chat solution are often missed, and there is a need for a forum-like platform where in depth discussions can nourish. The Lisk Forums played this role for more than a year, but its reach is quite limited. For this reason, we’ve decided to focus on the Lisk Subreddit as the first point of contact for new members and in-depth discussions. We’re currently in talks with several members of the community and weighing the options for moving delegate related topics off the forums and to another platform. As of last month, weekly updates on the Lisk Forum were discontinued and the changes above have taken into effect.

To receive the most up to date information regarding the Lisk platform make sure to follow the Lisk Blog, the Lisk Subreddit and subscribe to the Lisk Newsletter.

Original Blog Post

Lisk testnet version 0.8.0b has been released. If you have a testnet node running, make sure to upgrade to the new version, it has some minor bug fixes.

The blockchain itself is not being DDOS'd, it's the servers where we are hosting our nodes for https://login.lisk.io.

Financial Report — February 2017

With the successful establishment of the Lisk Foundation in Zug, we are publishing Financial Reports on a monthly basis.

As of the 3rd April 2017 at 6pm CEST, the Lisk Foundation controls the following fiat and cryptocurrency assets for on-going operations and long-term storage:

• 1,104,596.29 CHF
• 726,265.96 EUR
• 299,949.77 USD
• 9,992.30838103 BTC
• 4,369,229.69895737 LSK
• 22,533,551,140,334 bytes

Additionally, the Lisk Foundation holds the following assets for bounties and advisers:

• 3,868,044.77211678 LSK (Bounties)
• 761,745.87898046 LSK (Advisers)

Currency conversions
The Lisk Foundation is handling multiple currencies such as CHF, EUR, USD and various cryptocurrencies. The accounting and our financial reports are all done in CHF.
In February 2017 the Lisk Foundation exchanged the following currencies:

• 16. February — BTC>CHF: 502,917.39 CHF
• 24. February — BTC>EUR: 517,653.10 EUR

Expenditures
In February 2017 the Lisk Foundation spent approximately 19,832.20 CHF for all operations. Below you can find an approximate breakdown of the expenses for February. Please note, payments to the lightcurve GmbH are being executed only at the beginning of a quarter.

• PR: 7,007 CHF
• Legal: 10,905.20 CHF
• Conferences & Meetups: 1,920 CHF

The financial reports are published with a delay to give more accurate data.
Not included are: Taxes, exchange fees, smaller expenses throughout the year, dust and random payments to our cryptocurrency wallets. The given numbers are only an approximation.

Poloniex LSK closing price, 2nd April: 0.00024648 BTC/LSK
Coinbase BTC closing price, 2nd April: $1,093.52
LSK closing price, 2nd April: $0.2695308

Original Blog Post

Since January 2017 the lightcurve GmbH is in a contractual collaboration with the Lisk Foundation, founded by Oliver Beddows and myself. Today, I want to introduce our company to the Lisk Community and explain how heavily Lisk will benefit from it.

Responsibilities of lightcurve
A blockchain strategy consultancy, development studio and marketing agency in one, that is lightcurve! We are supporting the Lisk ecosystem in many ways; for once with strategy sessions discussing how to proceed with the platform and how to grow the community economically. With heavily tested code we are advancing the various products overseen by the Lisk Foundation. By attending conferences, giving presentations about Lisk and organising meetups we are increasing the visibility of the Lisk platform within the blockchain industry and beyond. Another big focus is to answer all kinds of support queries from the community which come through on the Lisk Support Center.

Core principles of lightcurve
Based in Berlin we are crafting high quality strategies and code made in Germany, with a special focus on reliability, efficiency and security. The longevity of our products is of utmost importance for us, we live and breath this dictum everyday with our contributions to the Lisk codebases.

Our office and team
Currently, we are sitting at WeWork Sony Center, the most iconic business district in Berlin. However, this space becomes too small for us. Therefore, we are making preparations to move to our own office space in which we can scale up quickly and easily.
Our team currently consists of nine members, we are expecting further additions soon, especially within the development and marketing departures.

Making lightcurve part of the Lisk Community
Not only to contribute to the Lisk ecosystem but also to see and feel the community needs, we are continuously making advancements to lightcurve’s transparency and its position within the Lisk Community.

Three important steps were done today; by officially adding lightcurve to Lisk’s contributors list on its website, launching the lightcurve website and introducing lightcurve to the Lisk Community with this blog post.

In the next days and weeks further steps will be taken, some we want to announce now. First, we are sponsoring a blockchain meetup in Berlin in which we will discuss Lisk’s advancements of the past month right at the start of every event. Second, we are registering and setting up our own delegate on the Lisk network. All delegate rewards will be evenly split between all lightcurve employees and freelancers with no active delegate spot. It’s up to the community if enough votes are gathered to get into the top 101, Oliver and I will vote with our private LSK exclusively for the lightcurve delegate.

Situation between Lisk Foundation and lightcurve GmbH
I think it’s very important to explain the constellation between the Lisk Foundation and the lightcurve GmbH. As both companies have the same founders, it’s in our best interest to explain transparently why we decided for that setup.
The Lisk Foundation is overseeing and managing the Lisk project in a non-profit way as we believe this is the right path for such a stellar protocol. Even though the non-profit structure is a huge benefit for the philosophy and values behind the project, we believe it’s not the best case for an actual business with rapid development cycles and quick decision makings. Therefore, the foundation decided to outsource different kind of activities — like programming, design, marketing, PR, or liquidation of funds — while coordinating the progress made.

As the founders of the Lisk project we want to keep the original spirit while also be responsible for the development and community. Therefore, we founded lightcurve to do exactly that. It doesn’t mean that the Lisk Foundation won’t cooperate with other third party development studios in the future or collaborate with other contractors, e.g. a marketing agency.

We hope that our blog post clarifies our intentions and the direction we are going with the Lisk Foundation and with the lightcurve GmbH.

From Max and Oliver.

Original Blog Post

Thanks for the concerns. You've provided many valid points, here are some facts to create a more structured opinion:


LiskHQ has abstained completely from the politics behind the choosing of delegates. What does this mean? We're not endorsing nor rejecting anything that's currently happening within the delegate positions. We are aware of the existence of voting groups (ARK, GDT, ELITE) and that's about it.


You're correct that there is another group battling for positions on the 101 delegates. In my opinion, their tactics are aimed towards guaranteeing them delegate positions. The DPoS algorithm used for the Lisk network is prone to these simple tactics, harnessing the financial aspect of being a delegate and using it to their advantage. Our focus is not "who's a delegate", we've changed gears and are focusing all of our efforts towards development of the network and community growth. Here's a discussion on changing DPoS so it's a bit harder for such groups to take a hold of the network: Solutions to improve Lisk DPoS #353


Like I said above, we're no longer supporting nor rejecting delegates and what they wish to do for the Lisk platform. I can guarantee you, we're not endorsing anyone (i.e. we're not taking any sides, it's a decentralized network!). It is correct to say that not so long ago I personally tried to guide GDT into a "supporting" role towards the Lisk network by stating delegates should be pro-active and use forging rewards for the benefit of the Lisk Ecosystem. This did not bode well with GDT and the delegates, and many rebelled or simply didn't want to do this. I learned my lesson that time, and decided to move on from trying to social engineer delegates behavior to focusing on growing the Lisk community and forming key relationships.


There are members from the GDT group who are exceptional and have stayed loyal to Lisk throughout all this time. We highlight those members and many times reward them. But we don't associate them with GDT as a whole (even though they are in the group). Here's two blog posts which rewards those loyal members:

For The Lisk Community, Thank You.

Community Engagement Rewarded!

Hopefully this quick reply sheds more information on our stance.

Thanks for reading!

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On March 31st at 7:00 PM CEST, members of the Lisk Foundation and employees of the lightcurve GmbH working on the Lisk platform will livestream a community Q&A.

Lisk is a blockchain applications platform that enables its users to build applications from the ground up in JavaScript. The decentralized platform allows for the deployment, distribution and monetization of sidechains onto the Lisk blockchain. The Lisk network is operated using a highly efficient Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPOS) consensus model, which is secured by democratically-elected delegates. The cryptocurrency underpinning the Lisk platform is called LSK.

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Original Blog Post

That's rather strange, it's working on my side. I would recommend using the Lisk Nano if your intentions are sending or receiving transactions:

Lisk Nano Download

Thanks for pointing this out. We're having some difficulties with our official login nodes at this time. While we fix the problems, you can try to login through community supported web-logins. Please note: Community Lisk web-logins are hosted by dedicated community members and by using them you are acknowledging the potential risk associated with it.