Lisk Updates: Financial Strategy and Development Roadmap

by Francesco Galati · Published December 30, 2018 · Updated December 30, 2018

End of December 2018.

We all know how the end of the year works: we play it in reverse and try to find good intentions for the next year.

Notwithstanding the year-long bear market that affected the whole crypto sector, Lisk had a pretty good year in terms of updates and developments. In one of the latest updates, they laid down their financial strategy and development roadmap for 2019.

Financial Strategy

On the official Twitter channel, Lisk published a video where the CEO himself, Max Kordex, explained their financial strategy for 2019. Lisk has always been transparent regarding the amount of funding they have and how the spend it: all numbers are shown in their website and the total funding at their disposal is summarised in the image above.

The key takeaways from this video are the following:

first of all, given the dynamics of the market witnessed during this year, the company believes that a diversification of their financial portfolio is necessary as an hedge against market movements;
as result, a balance between stable, volatile and fiat assets is much needed;
Lisk decided to exchange some of their crypto holdings in Swiss Francs, to hedge against the market without removing potential for further upside;
this has been done – Max specifies – without giving up any of the 7 million Lisk tokens still hold by the company.

This brings at 12 million the amount the company holds in Swiss Francs, a diversification of the portfolio that the Lisk Foundation believes that represents the proper financial background needed to deliver their blockchain product.

Development Roadmap

On the 20th of December Lisk updated its development roadmap.

The company divided what needed to be done in three main phases: inception, quality and performance and architecture and design.

Inception: the inception phase is completed – as it represents progresses already made towards their proposed Blockchain Application Platform, between Lisk Core versions 0.1.0 to 1.0.0.
Quality and Performance: this phase includes a number of key improvements to API & vote verification performance, developer tooling, and adds benchmarking of nodes.
This phase is mostly represented by updates on Lisk Core, Lisk Elements and Lisk Commander.What still needs to be done for this phase is to Replace Lisk Build with an inbuilt system for building Lisk Core, Create transaction elements and pool elements for Lisk Elements and Migrate commander to TypeScript and add multi-sig transactions and sign commands for Lisk Commander.
It is however good to point out that all these points are being translated in LIP (Lisk Improvement Proposals) and will soon be developed.
Architecture and Design: this phase has the aim of implementing a new modular and resilient architecture for Lisk Core. For obvious reasons, this is the phase that still needs a lot of work. In fact, it is better to first develop functioning products and then to take care of the architecture and design of them.
All the work that needs to be done is in progress and mostly focuses on Lisk Core. The necessary updated include the introduction of flexible, resilient and modular architecture for Lisk Core, improving the transaction processing efficiency and to introduce two distinct versioning schemes, one for the Lisk Core application and one for the Lisk protocol. This will allow, for instance, a better overview when updating to a new Lisk Core release is optional or mandatory.

After completing the Architecture & Design phase, the architecture used to create new applications will be finalised, allowing developers to start the development of proof-of-concept applications aligned with the future SDK. Indeed, Lisk team has highlighted more times that its roadmap has been designed with a pragmatic perspective towards the easiest, most accessible and attractive blockchain application platform for developers to build on.

Other areas, such as Security and Reliability, Network Economics , Longevity and evolved Delegated Proof of Stake are still to be developed, as their require extensive research, iterating the feedback received by the first products developed.

By delivering a very honest development roadmap Lisk shows that there still is a lot to do in order to fulfil their vision but also that there is a lot of willingness to do so in the most professional way.