lisk

Following a $6.5m crowdsale, Lisk, the JavaScript compatible cryptocurrency, has deployed its version 0.3.0 with sidechains capability. Lisk as a currency starts trading on all major exchanges starting May 24th.

Lisk is an app store for peer-to-peer apps that work with a blockchain (the digital ledger popularly used by Bitcoin) or its sidechains (essentially, blockchain-to-blockchain operations and ledgers).

By the end of the year, Lisk will enable anyone to a decentralised app store with hundreds of apps that mimic Bitcoin, but for any type of peer-to-peer transaction beyond payment, using an easy user interface on their iPhone or Android, said a statement.

Sidechains are an independent cryptographic ledger that attaches to the main blockchain, but does not impact the speed or security of the main chain, it said.

The Lisk vision is to have a highly scalable public blockchain where decentralised applications can be programmed without learning the often complex languages of individual blockchains.

In this case, Lisk chose JavaScript, the world's most popular programming language (more popular than C/C++ or Java), as it has a huge, global base of developers that can adapt existing applications or create new ones by using Lisk's easy-to-use SDK and extensive documentation for rapid development of decentralized applications (dapps) and custom blockchains.

Max Kordek, co-founder and CEO of Lisk, said: "Lisk is utterly unique. There is no public cryptocurrency platform which allows developers to easily deploy their own blockchain and build a JavaScript dapp on it.

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"This will give millions of developers the ability to create their own custom blockchains, particularly around consumer applications, including games, social networks and the Internet of Things, but the same core functionality can also be used to develop and scale business applications."

Lisk funded its vision by holding a four-week crowdsale which ended on March 21, 2016, raising more than 14,000 bitcoins and 80 million crypti (80% of the existing market). The price of those assets on the final day of the sale was $5.75m, but an increase in Bitcoin valuation since then has made its crowdsale proceeds currently worth $6.5m – a remarkable achievement for a two-man team based in separate cities (Aachen, Germany, and Birmingham, UK).

Kordek and his CTO/co-founder Oliver Beddows are no stranger to cryptocurrency development. Kordek became very involved in cryptocurrency as a college student in 2013, initially in the Litecoin community, then as CEO of the Nxt Organization (Nxt has been a top 20 coin since its inception), and finally as an active member of the Crypti cryptocurrency team. Lisk was created from a fork of Crypti code and has enjoyed huge support from the Crypti community, as evidenced by the sale of 80 percent of all Crypti tokens to support the Lisk crowdsale.

Beddows has been a full-stack software developer for more than 15 years and developed tools on Crypti prior to teaming up with Kordek to create Lisk. Beddows is responsible for all core development of the Lisk platform and managing community contributions to the code.

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