The Future is Bright for Lisk
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Open Source, Lisk, Cryptocurrency

Last night, one of our advisors officially resigned from his position on the Board of Advisors for the Lisk Foundation. We (Max and Oliver) would like to begin this post by thanking our former advisor, Charles Hoskinson, for the sage advice and counsel he provided us over these past few months.

We would like to also use this opportunity to update the community on the positive relationship between Lisk and its Board of Advisors, an important circle of influencers and leaders who will continue to provide us with wisdom and experience.

Our views on advisors

We believe there are two types of advisors: active and passive. Active advisors constantly contact the management board and advise as they see fit. Passive advisors wait until the management board asks for advice, for the time being they therefore stay silent. We are lucky to have advisors who have taken an active role in providing us with counsel, even during the times when we made a conscious decision to go in a different direction.

The whole team at Lisk has been working hard every day because we sincerely believe in the long-term success of our project. Sometimes, we decided to opt against what we felt was a short-term benefit because, after consideration, we felt that the resources could be better spent later on. Our reasoning is that one could not build a house without a strong foundation to support it, and until ours was in place we did not feel it would be right to make certain investments.

The good news is that by the end of last year, and with the help of our legal team, with the great effort of our active Lisk team, and with the support of our community, we were able to establish the Lisk Foundation in Switzerland. This year, the project has been vastly accelerated, and we have the funding and the core team to produce extraordinary work.

We are here to stay … for a long time

It’s worth repeating: Lisk is here to stay, and for a very long time. We have made a commitment to a mass community to build an extremely high quality product knowing that this can’t happen overnight. As a result, we treat our funds with the greatest care while simultaneously ensuring that we maintain an optimal pace for development. Since the formation of the Foundation, we’ve been able to take advantage of our station to position Lisk for growth.

Some community members have complained about our decision to attempt to establish a gGmbH, stating that this process wasted three months of our time. Though we understand their thinking, in retrospect this was the best choice we had at the time. We were in constant contact with German lawyers to set it up and had we completed the process, we would have established a precedent in Germany which anyone could replicate — an important step for the ecosystem. Moreover, at that time last year, we were not in contact with the attorneys we eventually hired in Switzerland and, moreover, without permitted access to the ICO funds, we didn’t have the monetary resources to go in that direction either. However, once it increasingly became clear that the country Germany isn’t progressive enough, we made the big decision to set the Foundation in Switzerland — a very good decision at the end.

Here is a brief timeline of the major events since our ICO concluded:

21.03.2016: The Lisk ICO ended.

24.05.2016: The Lisk network launches.

xx.06.2016: gGmbH materials ready, started talking with the government (Germany).

01.08.2016: Oliver and Max move to Berlin.

xx.09.2016: gGmbH materials finished, frustration with the government (Germany).

01.10.2016: Switched to a Swiss legal firm.

16.11.2016: Commercial register entry of the Lisk Foundation.

30.11.2016: The Lisk network stabilizes.

19.12.2016: Lisk Foundation fully established and ready to go.

During the three “lost months”, we constantly improved the Lisk core and user interface, introduced Lisk Nano, maintained the Lisk Explorer and various resources, established the lightcurve GmbH, and searched for office space in Berlin.

With Oliver’s fantastic work and extraordinary familiarity with the code base, we successfully stabilized the code towards the end of 2016. If we had too many new developers on board at the time, Lisk development would probably have progressed more slowly on an individual basis during that time because they would have to study the code base first, before they can jump deep into coding.

For new developers of an existing code base, it’s easier to study a stable and modular platform, rather than needing to make heavy changes everywhere to make it stable subsequently.

In the future, people will know of the Lisk that was born in December

From everything we have seen, one can conclude that December was the true beginning for Lisk. From this point, our progress accelerated dramatically.

Looking back, we released Lisk v0.5.0 on the 30th November, Lisk Nano v0.1.2 on the 2nd December, Lisk v0.5.1 on the 8th December and Lisk Explorer 1.0.0 on the 12th December.

The lightcurve GmbH, which was started by Oliver and Max to lead the development of Lisk, was also actively hiring simultaneously. Around that time, we hired two freelance developers, one starting in December and another in January. Since then, two more developers have begun working on Lisk as well. Yet one more will be coming “online” in April, with another two are currently in late negotiations to join in. If you do the math, we’ll have seven developers working full-time next month, with a high likelihood of at least nine developers by May.

While our development team is actively growing, we also starting to look for other important positions to fill. For example, we’re evaluating hiring additional contributors for important verticals like legal, marketing, community, documentation, administration and support.

Ramping up communications

Some have also made hay by criticizing our communications to date — and they were right to say so. We were so busy making things happen that we struggled in January to report our progress, but we’ve swiftly learned from our mistakes and have ramped it up for February and for the future. In a short span of time, we have distributed a substantial financial report, published seven blog posts, issued a press release, conducted a 1+ hour long community meeting through a live stream, and maintain a consistent presence on the Lisk.Chat and r/Lisk.

Soon, we will introduce further changes and improvements on the methods with which we communicate and improve how we organize our community. Expect major changes to our forum, added focus on r/Lisk, and reports you’ll find far less boring.

Moving forward

We’ve always maintained a strategy with our employees, freelancers and contributors to ensure they’re not misused or misappropriated for hype. We will treat our advisory board the same way.

We’re currently in the middle of significant change — and it’s been a change for good. Our legal structure is complete and running smoothly, our team is coming together, a positive company culture is being formed, we are working together with important contractors, we’re constantly streamlining our internal and external communications, and our development moves faster than ever before while our products increasingly become better and better.