The Token Valuation Canvas should help investors making the right decision when analyzing potential project investments. We have evaluated the Lisk project using the BlockchainHub Token Valuation Canvas. Please note that classifications, categories and descriptions used in this canvas only represent a proposal of how a token could be evaluated.

Disclaimer:
This token valuation is based on a personal opinion and for information purposes only. It is not intended to be an investment advice.

Basics

Type of the token

The token that powers the Lisk network is called LSK. To send LSK from one account to another takes 10 seconds, after about 1–2 minutes the transaction can be deemed immutable. It is an intrinsic token because, like Bitcoin, it is used to write to the blockchain by paying transaction fees. (Fee / transaction = 0.1 LSK / Delegate registration = 25 LSK, etc.)

Role of the token

Lisk (LSK) is a usage or utility token. It is used to pay for the network fees which occur for different types of transactions.

Transactions at the current point are:

Sending the token around
Registering a delegate
Setup of a multi-sig account
Registering a second passphrase
Voting for delegates

Transactions in the future might be:

Registering an app
Updating an app
Sending the token into or out of a sidechain
More to come…

Supply

Pre-mined supply: 100,000,000 LSK were created and distributed during the ICO.

Current supply: As of 7th November, 2017 – 19:00: 114,567,840 LSK are in existence. The current supply can always be checked by visiting the Lisk Block Explorer.

Total Supply: There is no maximum concerning Total Supply.

Inflation rate: On the 1,451,520th block the first forging reward will trickle onto the network, starting with 5 LSK in every block. After one forging round (i.e. after 101 blocks) all transaction fees are equally distributed between participating delegates, and for every block individually forged, a reward is then issued. The forging rewards will change the longer the network is running. After 3,000,000 blocks (~1 year) the reward per block will be reduced by one, stopping at one LSK per block after 4 years. That means you can expect the following forging rewards and inflation over the coming years:
Block 1,451,520 – 4,451,520: 5 LSK per block – 15.77% inflation in the 1st year.
Block 4,451,520 – 7,451,520: 4 LSK per block – 10.9% inflation in the 2nd year.
Block 7,451,520 – 10,451,520: 3 LSK per block – 7.37% inflation in the 3rd year.
Block 10,451,520 – 13,451,520: 2 LSK per block – 4.58% inflation in the 4th year.
Block 13,451,520 – ∞: 1 LSK per block – 2.19% inflation in the 5th year.
etc.

Distribution: During the ICO 100,000,000 LSK were distributed across the following groups:

ICO participants: 85%
Core team: 7.8%
Campaigns and bounties: 4%
Advisors, partners and third parties: 2%
Early supporters: 1%
First-day ICO participants: 0.2%

Viability of Project

Legal status

Categorised as a security? There is no information about a categorisation by the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) for Lisk as the market cap is still not very important and as it is mainly a German project & foundation registered in Switzerland. In case of an inquiry, they will probably have to provide (together with an experienced law firm) documented evidence to prove that their token is not a “security” under U.S. law.

Legally approved? The Lisk ICO ended on 21st March, 2016. Around that time, ICOs were not that frequent, popular and hyped as they have become in 2017. Therefore, there were no special regulations in Switzerland during the Lisk ICO. In September 2017, the FINMA (Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority) sent out a press release concerning ICOs on their website. The FINMA recognises the innovative potential of such a technology and has been supporting efforts in developing and implementing blockchain solutions in the Swiss finance industry for several years. Nevertheless, it has also indicated that it is investigating a number of ICO cases to determine whether regulatory provisions have been breached and that ICOs may come under existing regulatory legislation.

Where is the company registered? The company is registered under the name of “Lisk Foundation” in Zug, Switzerland.

Do they have legal guidance? Guido Schmitz-Krummacher is an experienced entrepreneur with more than 25 years of leadership experience in companies at different stages and segments. He is a member of the Lisk Foundation and his background is in international law and economics. He is supporting start-ups engaged in blockchain-technologies at board level to set up their legal and financial environment.

GitHub Commits

How many? Lisk has actually 29 repositories on GitHub and 6 of them are very popular. The main repositories get updated regularly (every few minutes / hours) and there is a lot of code inside.

How often? There are code commits on a regular basis, every few minutes / hours the main repositories get updated.

Are they simulating commits? By checking the code history on GitHub, it is easily visible that the commits are legit and not only typo fixes.

Is it forked from another project? Max Kordek (CEO of Lisk): “The Lisk code base was forked from the Crypti project Oliver and I were a part of for 18 months before we started Lisk. About 2 years ago Crypti collected 750 BTC in order to develop a Blockchain application platform. In the end the Crypti foundation developed a code base which was a good starting point for a new project.”

Is the code open source? Yes, the code is open source.

Devs/Team

Background: On the official Lisk website, there are 26 members listed in the team section. Let us focus on the most important two ones: Max Kordek (Founder & President) and Oliver Beddows (Founder & Vice President). Max and Oliver were already involved together in a former crypto-project called Crypti but they quit it after 18 months to start Lisk, a fork of Crypti. Lisk was created because Max and Oliver had different ideas and visions than most of the others members of the Crypti foundation and so they decided that a new start with a proper funding was a better solution for them. Both of them are also Co-Founders of “Lightcurve”, a blockchain product development studio and consultancy with special focus on coding, marketing and support. Oliver has not completed any information concerning a university degree on his LinkedIn profile and Max is a dropout from the RWTH Aachen University (he was studying Electrical Engineering).

Track record: As already mentioned before, Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows have been in the crypto-scene for a long time. Their main previous project was Crypti and they created Lisk later on. As Co-Founders, President and Vice-President they both count as legit main company members of Lisk. By regularly following the Lisk Medium Blog it is possible to get a quick overview of new hired devs and an idea about their background. For example, in September and October 2017 Lisk hired the following new developers:

Lucas Isasmendi: For those active on our GitHub account, Lucas might be a familiar face. That’s because he began working remotely back in April from his home in Argentina. He relocated to Berlin on September 12 and will continue working for Lisk as a Backend Developer. Prior to Lisk, Lucas spent six years in IT consulting and four years as an entrepreneur.
François Chavant: François joined Lisk on September 6 as a DevOps Engineer. From France, he has a Linux SysAdmin background and DevOps experience. Bringing automation and CI/CD forward for Lisk are among François’ top goals.
Yashar Ayari: Yashar Ayari has been a Frontend Engineer for Lisk since June 1, but moved to Berlin to join the team at the office on October 23. Originally from Iran, his hobbies include teaching himself new coding techniques and playing video games. Yashar has spent a number of years as a Frontend Developer in his previous companies.
Gina Contrino: Gina Contrino started working for Lisk as a Frontend Developer on October 2. Her previous experience is in frontend and backend development. Coding is something she enjoys doing both in and out of the office.
Juan González: Straight from Minnesota to Berlin, Juan González joined Lisk on October 2 as a DevOps Engineer. His background is predominantly in DevOps and software development, particularly in C.
Nazar Hussain: The newest Backend Developer to join the team is Nazar Hussain. He began working for Lisk on October 23. Nazar came to Berlin from Pakistan where he was formerly a Senior Architect at Ekomi.

Welcomed by the community? From a personal point of view during the ICO: Lisk seemed to be quite welcomed by the community. Especially in that time (early 2016) ICOs were not as popular as they are now and something new was happening. That’s also one of the reasons why people invested a lot of money (more than 14,000 BTC). Max Kordek was already known by a vast majority of the crypto-community, although there was the following point of criticism while scrolling through different bitcointalk threads: Some people questioned his ability of successfully building a new project. Their main argument was that someone who had already “failed” before (Crypti) wouldn’t be able to build a new innovating project just because of high funding.

Long term commitment? The Lisk team is definitely committed to the project, they have members from all around the world and build a solid crew all together. Almost all of them are working full-time on Lisk. Leon Gaban is a full stack developer and editor on Medium, he is writing different articles (Crypto Citizen Review) where he takes a deeper look into certain companies or cryptocurrencies. This is what he said about the team in his article about Lisk: “For a cryptocurrency project, the Lisk team has some of the best community transparency and communication out there. Each month or so they host a one hour Q&A YouTube session, and they recently just finished their first Reddit AMA. They cover everything from current development to new hires and take questions about the Lisk project. Team members are also very active in their chat channels and forums.”

How big is the team? On the official Lisk website, there are 26 members listed in the team section. The team consists of:

2 Co-Founders
4 Front End Developers
6 Back End Developers
2 Full Stack Developers
2 DevOps Engineers
1 System Architect
4 Marketing Managers
1 Marketing Leader
1 Social Media Manager
1 Student Assistant
1 QA Engineer
1 Responsible for Legal & Financials

Do they have a big professional network? The LinkedIn page of Lisk is not very big, it seems to have started 3 months ago and has only ~ 800 followers. Lisk has a big online community commenting regularly on its original Bitcointalk-thread. The thread has more than 2100 pages.

Since when are they active in the community? Max Kordek talked in an interview on YouTube about his previous activities in the crypto-scene (1:28 – 3:31). He was first active in the Litecoin community where he was running multiple pools and created some websites to give Litecoin users a better insight on how the network was working. His big start in the crypto-scene was when he founded the NXT organization -> He went on conferences of the NXT currency and was deeply involved in strategy-discussions of NXT. After NXT he moved on to the Crypti project because he believed that a complete decentralization was amazing for technology. In the end, Crypti was not that successful and he decided to build his own startup -> Lisk. He says that Lisk was heavily influenced by his experiences he gained through Crypti & NXT. Olivier Beddows is a full stack developer with over 15 years’ experience in developing web based e-commerce applications. He joined Crypti in early 2015 as a tools developer, and since then he has gone on developing much of the core infrastructure on which Lisk relies upon.

Good leaders? Max Kordek gained leadership experience while being the CEO of the NXT organization and a foundation member of Crypti. Oliver Beddows was also involved in Crypti, but apart from being a full stack developer for many years, he doesn’t seem to have any special leadership experience before Lisk.

Network Effects

Traffic

How many transactions? Lack of stats.

Does transaction volume increase? The transaction volume is slowly increasing over time.

Stable running? The Lisk blockchain has been running stable except for some minor bugs which have always been fixed immediately. “Lisk has never been hacked nor are we aware of any active hacking attempts, besides DDoS attacks. All bugs occurred due to rare edge cases within the network.” – Statement taken from the Official Lisk Developer Hub. On 29th May, 2016 (5 days after launch) the Lisk team encountered a critical issue with the Lisk client, which caused block generation to stop for approximately 6 hours. No user funds were in danger. They released Lisk v0.3.1, which successfully resolved the issues found in the previous release. As a side effect of this issue, the forging reward offset was increased to a higher block number.

Potential uptrend regarding network usage? Personal opinion: After the Rebranding and the release of the Lisk App SDK in 2018, there will be a significant uptrend regarding network usage for sure, as more users will enter and start using the platform.

Source code

What about source code? From the beginning on, the Lisk team shared all relevant information concerning source codes before the ICO. They published a blog post on 2nd February, 2016 with the following statement: “As of yesterday, all Lisk source code repositories are now open source. For this purpose, we have registered a GitHub organization in order to create a clean repository structure. Therefore, we invite all open source enthusiasts and Node.js developers to take a look.”
So everyone could get their own opinion before investing in the ICO.

Community

How big? Lisk has actually (14th November, 2017):

More than 70,000 Followers on Twitter
~ 19,000 Likes on Facebook
~ 17,000 Subscribers on Reddit
~ 7600 members in the Lisk chat room

How engaging? Users are quite active, especially on Reddit. Their last AMA on Reddit was on 30th August, 2017 -> There were more than 200 comments / questions in a short period of time. Users are also commenting and interacting regularly on Facebook & Twitter.

Are the founders active? The Lisk team is very active on various conferences and meet-ups. They organize events and tours all around the world. For example, in September 2017, the team went on an Asia tour and held various meet-ups in cities like Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo & Mumbai. All tour dates and events are announced on their blog and social media channels.

Any AMAs (Ask Me Anything)? They host “Ask me anything” sessions, their first one was on 30th August, 2017. The community is quite active on Reddit and members of the Lisk team answer questions regularly. They also host Q&A sessions on YouTube regularly.

PR Style? They send out project updates and information on a regular basis. Their Twitter is easy to follow, all important and upcoming news & events are posted and detailed in their blog posts. They do not spam the community with too much updates and everyone can get a good overview. They are not bashing any other projects, they concentrate on their own project and compete in a fair manner together with other blockchain start-ups.

Resilience

If there are difficulties, how quickly does the project recover? Let’s split this question into two categories:

1. Technical difficulties and their solution: Until now, Lisk has not encountered big technical difficulties. Although in the early stage of the project, a critical issue once happened and the block generation stopped for ~6 hours, no user funds were in danger and the next release fixed the problem immediately. The team solved this problem in a very short period of time and there were no serious consequences.

2. Release delays and their effect on the price: On 22nd November, 2017, the relaunch/rebranding date was announced during the Lisk Meetup in Berlin. The relaunch was initially planned for the end of 2017 but they did not manage to finish in time. Then the 20th February, 2018 was announced as the new official date. The price of Lisk pumped a lot a few days before the meeting, because a lot of people were speculating that the relaunch would still happen in 2017. The price was ~11$/LSK before the meeting and plunged immediately after the new date announcement to ~7-8$/LSK. Nevertheless, at the time of writing (14th December, 2017) the price already recovered to ~10.50$/LSK.

Trading

Trading Volume: There is quite an acceptable trading volume on exchanges. (Taken from coinmarketcap.com: 14th November, 2017 – 22:30 – ~$23,000,000) Lisk is listed on more than 10 exchanges including the most popular ones, like for example Bittrex or Poloniex.

Market uptrend: 1 LSK token has a value of ~$7 (14th November, 2017 – 22:30)
Own opinion: this is still quite an underevaluated price compared to the upcoming releases and the number of available project funds of the Lisk Team. Especially if everything goes right and the Lisk App SDK release is successful, there will probably be new users joining the ecosystem.

Token supply trajectory: Every 3,000,000 blocks (~1 year) the reward per forged block gets reduced by one. Until now, a forging delegate has been earning 5 LSK tokens per forged block. On 17th November, 2017, this block reward will be reduced to 4 LSK token per forged block. (This is a similar process like the Bitcoin halving and can be compared to it) The token supply creation is reduced in total and therefore the inflation rate also decreases. An overview of the Lisk inflation rate and token supply can already be found in the “Supply” section of this canvas.

If Token is pre-ICO

ICO Type

Is it rushed? Do they spend too much on marketing? At the time of the Lisk ICO in early 2016, sponsored content on blockchain related websites was a lot cheaper than it is nowadays. Therefore they had no big marketing expenses for displaying some ads on blockchain related websites. A major point that helped them a lot and attracted a lot of new investors were their bounty campaigns. The Lisk team offered rewards in the form of extra Lisk tokens to people that shared information about the ICO on Facebook & Twitter. Especially the Bitcointalk signature campaign was quite successful at that time because it was something new -> This signature campaign consists of putting some relevant information for advertising in some free field that is displayed near a user’s profile information whenever this user is commenting/posting somewhere on Bitcointalk. Nowadays, this form of advertising is not that successful anymore because there are a lot of ICOs, and people do not really pay attention to these “signature fields” anymore.
A big part of their marketing campaign definitely happened on social networks and forums.

Token distribution? Who gets what? During the ICO 100,000,000 LSK were distributed to the following groups:

ICO participants: 85%
Core team: 7.8%
Campaigns and bounties: 4%
Advisors, partners and third parties: 2%
Early supporters: 1%
First-day ICO participants: 0.2%

Is the ICO capped? There was no cap set for the Lisk ICO. At that time (early 2016) ICOs were not that hyped in the crypto-scene as nowadays, and therefore there was no special expectation about extremely huge fundings. Nevertheless, the Lisk ICO collected a huge amount of funds:

Bitcoin: ~14,009 BTC
Crypti: ~80,742,575 XCR

At the time when the ICO finished, Lisk was one of the top 20 most successful crowd-funds worldwide.

For how long will it run? The ICO started on the 22nd February 2016 and ended on the 21st March 2016.

Token pricing during ICO? The LSK exchange rate during the ICO was: 0.0001821238671 BTC / LSK. In March 2016, Bitcoin was around 400$ – 430$ / BTC depending on the date. By respecting the LSK exchange rate and the BTC price at that time, this leads to a price of ~0.07$ / LSK during the ICO.

Any institutional investors? By looking at the Lisk ICO Statistics, the number of unique participants was: 3908.
There were some big investors for sure, especially people that had acquired a bunch of BTC until 2016, but there were no big announcements concerning large institutional investors. The cryptocurrency market still had a very small market capitalisation compared to nowadays and big companies (except maybe exchanges) were not really investing.

Investor rights? As the Lisk ICO already ended more than a year ago, the ICO site is not active anymore and has been shut down.
I was able to find a copy of the Lisk Presale Purchase Agreement (last updated February 21, 2016).
The document has ~12 pages and contains the terms and conditions that govern the purchase of LSK during the Lisk Presale. As too many points are included in this document, I will not write them down here, I will put a link to the agreement in the “References” section instead.

Whitepaper

Is it too generic? It gives a good overview of the functions and core features of the blockchain project to the reader. It doesn’t go into much detail.

How is it structured? The introduction is quite short and definitely not too long. The reader gets a quick overview about: “What is Lisk?”, “Technical Background”, “Key Innovation Factors” and “Lisk Components”.
The whole Whitepaper itself is structured into following categories:

Introduction
Clients
Consensus
Core Features
Decentralised Applications
Appendix
Sources

Does it explain the need for a token? LSK is the official token built inside the Lisk Platform. It is used as a cryptocurrency as well as a currency to “feed” the platform for the resources used. All transactions in the network must contain some type of fee as a spam countermeasure. These types of fees include, for example:

Fees for transactions
Fees for registering a delegate
Fees for registering a second passphrase
Voting-fees
Fees to register a dapp, etc.

Created for marketing reasons only? It doesn’t seem that the whitepaper was written for marketing reasons only, because it is not really pretty. There are no graphics at all, there is only text. Its sole purpose is to give a general overview of the Lisk blockchain project.

Governance: There is no special token model explanation in the Whitepaper except an overview of the network fees and what types of transactions can be done in combination with the LSK token. There is some advice at the end of the document which indicates that in the future, developers may implement custom tokens in their dapps and use these tokens as the main currencies within their dapps. These tokens may be used in the same way as LSK or BTC, but the tokens cannot be moved directly from one dapp sidechain to another dapp sidechain. They must only move via the Lisk main chain. The abstract about the consensus mechanism compares obligations and roles of delegates vs. users: Lisk is based on the DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism. This method of consensus was originally created by the BitShares team.
DPoS is based on delegates creating blocks. Delegates are trusted accounts which are elected to be “Active Delegates”. The 101 delegate accounts with the most votes create the blocks. Other delegates are listed as “Standby Delegates”, and can advance to the top 101 list by receiving votes from the other Lisk owners. All users of Lisk tokens have 101 votes available to elect their favorite delegates to the top 101 list. The weight of each of the 101 votes is proportional to the amount of LSK the user has in the wallet the votes are cast from. This total amount is shown on the delegate list as an “Approval”, and is listed as a percentage of the 100 million LSK available that is voted for that delegate. Users get rewarded by earning some shares of the blocks that were forged by the delegates the users voted for. The delegates decide themselves how much they want to share of their forging profit, but, of course, this amount will have an impact on how many votes they get. Delegate promotion to the top 101 or demotion to the standby list happens at the completion of the 101 block generation cycle. Each cycle of 101 blocks is created by the top 101 delegates in random order. The block time is 10 seconds. Newly created blocks are broadcast to the network and added to the blockchain. After 6 to 10 confirmations, a block, along with its transactions, can be considered as confirmed. A complete 101 block generation cycle takes approximately 16 minutes. In DPoS, forks can occur, but the longest fork wins. Delegates must be online all the time and have sufficient uptime. Uptime is used to catalogue the reliability of a node by logging each time that it misses a block that was assigned to it. Users vote for the top 101 delegates based on several factors, uptime being one key factor used to make a determination. If a delegate drops below a certain rating, users may remove votes from the delegate in question due to poor performance.

Who wrote it? The Lisk Whitepaper was written by both CEOs Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows.

Security

Running alpha? The developers were running a testnet since early February 2016 until the launch of the mainnet on 24th May, 2016. In the “References” section you can find one of the team’s early post on their Medium Blog where they just updated the testnet to the latest Lisk client v0.1.1 on 10th February, 2016. On the official Lisk Developer Hub you can find a tutorial on how to set up a Lisk testnet on your machine to try out the network.

Code quality? The analysis was made without the help of a developer. While reading through different Reddit threads there were people complaining about the lack of speed of development and code structure. On the other hand, some people are saying that the code quality is great and that Lisk is a very promising project. In the “References” section you can find a typical discussion (Feburary 2017) on Reddit about this topic as an example, but you have to be careful in terms of using/believing this type of information because these are only random people speaking about their opinion.

External Audits? No known audit companies were mentioned by the team. Here is an official comment from CEO Max Kordek as an answer to an AMA-Question from August 2017 on Reddit. Max says: “In terms of development, the Core will be modular, stable, lean. It underwent several security audits.”

What other established devs say? There aren’t any public discussions from established devs about Lisk, because whenever you look at forum discussions, blog posts or social media posts, you find only general reviews and investment opinions. Furthermore, you can not really check if people are really developers when they pretend to be and are commenting on Reddit, for example. Like in other crypto projects, there is always a lot of FUD spread through these community discussions. Especially because of that it is quite difficult to check if discussions are legit or not.

Roadmap

Too ambitious? Lisk released their Development Roadmap on their official blog in August 2016. With this development plan they want to take the opportunity to explain the different phases they intend to put Lisk through over the next few years, and the various milestones they want to achieve for their users, developers, and the ecosystem overall. In total, there are 5 phases: Inception, Resilience, Expansion, Ascent, and Eternity; each with its own milestones, goals, and focus. The Roadmap does not seem to be too ambitious, especially because they also stated that the given plans were intended to be long-term and would take at least a few years. The Development Roadmap blog post gives an overview of the major changes and features. It will not include every granular change or addition. There will be many more changes along the road, so it wouldn’t make sense to describe everything within the blog post. Every bullet point in this roadmap isn’t a single, simple feature. It’s a milestone which might require several Lisk release cycles (versions) to be achieved.

On schedule? In the Lisk Development Roadmap you can find the following statement concerning project schedules: “Due to the dynamic nature of software development, we don’t want to forecast any dates, or deadlines from now. It should also be noted, milestones within a phase might be worked on in parallel, and once we establish development speed through a constant release cycle, we will be in the position to give more accurate timelines.” Personal observations: They mainly deliver as promised but they are not always delivering on time. For example, if we look at the actual Rebranding: Lisk is already planning for some time a Rebranding together with the Design Agency “Taikonauten”. Initially, they should have been working together from March – August 2017 to finish and release the Rebrand around September. Then the release was set for October, then some time later in Q4 2017 and in the end the new official date was set for 20th February, 2018. There are also concerns about the release of the SDK planned for Q1 2018. This is quite a big release and we also expect some delay for this one.

Market Analysis

Competition: Lisk can be seen as a Blockchain Platform that allows for the development of any type of decentralised application, either on top of Lisk or as a token via Lisk or as a sidechain application. Considering this wide array of possibilities, Lisk competitors are, for example Ethereum, Waves and a lot more, but each for a specific use case. Lisk is like a piece of dough, which you can use in the way you need it: Tokens, Sidechains, DAOs etc. Lisk’s team says in one of their blog posts concerning competition: “While it’s true that you can implement practically everything into a Lisk sidechain, we believe that the blockchain space is big enough to have several projects solving the same issues.” For example:

Decentralised storage can be done on a stand-alone blockchain or on Lisk.
Anonymous transactions can be done on a stand-alone blockchain or on Lisk.
A social blogging system can be done on a stand-alone blockchain or on Lisk.
And the list goes on…

Value proposition: Lisk is a lot of things at the same time:

A decentralised network
A cryptocurrency
A framework
A sidechain platform
A blockchain application platform
A blockchain service platform
A decentralised directory for applications
A decentralised and public delegate marketplace

One of the main highlights of Lisk that offers value and helps to solve customers’ problems is the Lisk App SDK. It is a framework to deploy your own sidechains and develop blockchain applications on top of them. Everything is written in JavaScript. That means you can develop platform-independent social networks, messengers, games, financial applications, prediction markets, exchanges, storage platforms, contract execution platforms, sharing economies, online shops, IoT applications, and a lot more on your own blockchain, fully decentralised, and without the hassle of complicated consensus protocols or P2P networking algorithms.

Demand for the product? The Lisk App SDK is planned to be released in Q1 2018. Once it has been released, it will be very attractive for developers to build their decentralized Apps on Lisk Sidechains. A very useful aspect is that everything is written in JavaScript, which is widely known by most developers all around the world and there will be no need for them to learn a new programming language. They can immediately start to set up and build their application on their own blockchain.

Revenue streams for future development: As of the 17th August, 2017 at 12pm CEST, the Lisk Foundation controls the following fiat and cryptocurrency assets for on-going operations and long-term storage:

1,044,152.24 CHF
2,439,081.91 EUR (2,781,470 CHF)
297,949.77 USD (289,827 CHF)
8,488.69414675 BTC (36,744,900 CHF)
4,361,375.03535737 LSK (8,909,220 CHF)
51,348,358,160,129 bytes (20,129,300 CHF)

Totalling: ~65.000.000 CHF (subject to volatile markets)

Other

Widely known? Lisk is quite well known, on GitHub there are currently 29 repositories and 6 of them are very popular. The main repository has more than 4000 commits and is updated every few hours. In comparison to Ethereum’s GitHub for example, Lisk’s GitHub is not as popular, of course, but it should be mentioned that Lisk is still a young project and that it is growing and developing constantly.

Easy to learn? Lisk focuses on JavaScript. The developers chose JavaScript because it runs literally everywhere, it is extremely popular & widespread, and has huge companies like Google or Microsoft working on its speed and security across a wide range of devices. Therefore, its ever increasing developer base and ease of access played a huge role in that decision.

Security: Official statement from the developers concerning JavaScript Security: “Even though JavaScript is a weakly typed language it doesn’t mean that it is inherently insecure. Yes, the programming language used plays an important role, but at the end of the day it is the developer’s obligation to write secure code in the first place. To further strengthen the code base, we are planning an eventual transition to TypeScript — a strongly typed JavaScript super-set — which, once implemented, should mitigate the issues normally associated with weakly typed code. We are also contemplating pushing back certain critical core features to C++ for maximum speed and security. In summary, we are leveraging all options available to solve some of the known problems associated with using JavaScript on such a project as Lisk.”

Author

This token valuation was provided by Jean-Antoine Parrer in December, 2017. If you have further questions regarding the content, please send an E-Mail to: jean.parrer@blockchainhub.net

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References:

Token Valuation – Lisk