Recap + Analysis: Lisk Relaunch Night

Pic 1.jpeg

This week marks the beginning of the new and improved Lisk. We’re beyond excited to enter this new phase, armed with a strong team, a supportive community, and a beautiful new website!

The Relaunch Event brought 500 attendees to the Westhafen Convention Center in Berlin, while around 50,000 views were recorded during the event’s livestream, and around 12,500 people watched it at the same time at the peak. We understand that not everyone could join us in person; and regardless of whether or not you got to catch our livestream, we want to recap the evening with a comprehensive summary of vital points, as the evening was filled with many important and captivating speeches and discussions.

Logo Reveal + Opening

The new Lisk logo is an amalgamation our identity and ideals. We just couldn’t wait to share it with the world, so we kicked off the evening with our logo reveal video. Our incredibly talented in-house Motion Designer, Julian Alterini, created this piece; we look forward to sharing many more videos of this caliber with you in the future.

Lisk co-founder and CEO Max Kordek gave the evening’s first talk, in which he provided a brief history of Lisk and discussed blockchain — its benefits as well as the current roadblocks we face in applying this technology.

“Blockchain technology could be used to remove borders, to empower future infrastructures or to bring transparency. Because of the fact that this technology is not very accessible nowadays, you need to know many different, complex fields like cryptography, peer to peer technology or game theory.”

He went on to explain this very reason is what prompted Oliver Beddows and Max to start this journey — to make this technology accessible to everyone in the world. He concluded the opening speech with the Lisk promise to everyone:

“Due to our extremely hard effort and a lot of time spent on this project until now, Lisk is stronger than ever before. We are prepared to make 2018 the best year we’ve ever seen yet.”

Lisk Brand and Identity

Following Max’s inspirational talk, Rlevance brand strategist Christian Vatter took to the stage to discuss how Lisk came to find its new identity and approach its new brand.

Christian revealed that as part of his role, he dug deep into the topic of blockchain in every way possible. Among the biggest goal was to make sure that the Lisk message is clear to everyone outside of the community — what Lisk is and why Lisk is doing what it is doing.

The way in which Christian helped Lisk find focus and live in its truth was to take a human-centered business approach. This means understanding its users while implementing business thinking and marketing creativity.

The journey began with the goal of understanding the potential of blockchain technology, the special qualities of Lisk and most importantly, its users’ needs. Christian held a series of workshops and interviews with Oliver and Max to pin down their motivations, goals, unique vision, as well as the strengths and features of the Lisk product. Christian also created a Slack channel where blockchain developers could discuss their needs and what they feel the strengths of Lisk are. This channel brought in over 2,000 posts in one week alone.

Lastly, Christian held one-on-one interviews with experts including ICONOMI co-founder Jani Valjavec (on the topic of blockchain philosophy), Head of Trading at Bitcoin Suisse AG Fabian Hediger (on the topic of financial aspects of blockchain), Wachsman PR founder David Wachsman (on the topic of public perception of blockchain), Head of Strategic Future Projects at Mercedes-Benz Christoph Farber (on the topic of corporate applications of blockchain) and Investor and Entrepreneur Thomas Schafbauer (on the topic of blockchain for business owners).

The three most vital conclusions that Rlevance came to following its comprehensive research was that -

“Lisk is a reliable and scalable platform to run blockchain applications.”
“Lisk makes creating blockchain applications more accessible.”
“Lisk wants to bring the benefits of blockchain applications to everyone.”
These insights led to Lisk’s value proposition -

“We enable blockchain creators.”

Lisk will enable blockchain creators by making apps easy to build with a Sidechain Development Kit (SDK), continued education on the topic of blockchain, inspiration with use cases, and much more. Lastly, Lisk will continue to uphold a solid and scalable infrastructure.

Presenting the New Lisk Ecosystem

Following Christian’s powerful presentation, Lisk Marketing Lead Thomas Schouten presented the audience with how the brand identity translated into products and design.

Thomas kicked off his presentation by explaining the multiple processes Lisk conducted as part of its rebrand — the strategy phase with Rlevance which began in March of last year, the design phase with Taikonauten which began in June, and the in-house development phase which began in November. We organized focus groups with our main stakeholders to conduct user testing and get insights into what we were missing.

After that, Thomas revealed the new and improved names of the Lisk products. Although Lisk Core will retain its original name, Lisk JS is renamed Lisk Elements, Lisky is renamed Lisk Commander, and the Lisk App is renamed Lisk Hub.

He also showed the world the beautiful Lisk Rebranding Video, also made by Julian, highlighting all the incredible facets of our new website.

He then carefully walked the audience through the new website, which was designed with different users in mind — newcomers to blockchain, developers, app commissioners and our greater community. He walked the audience through the different features of the Lisk Hub, including the Wallet and Explorer.

Our community can expect to see much more from us, as Thomas explained. These include a ramp up of video production for our YouTube channel. We will also hold many more curated events for beginners and blockchain experts. Read our newsletter for the latest developments at Lisk.

The Lisk Academy

Following Thomas’ presentation, Project Lead of the Lisk Academy, Jacob Kowalewski, took to the stage to present what he has been working so diligently on for the last several months. An educational one-stop shop for all things blockchain, the Lisk Academy is completely free-to-use.

Currently, the Academy is divided into Blockchain Basics and Blockchain Business.

Blockchain Basics includes four chapters — Blockchain Explained, Technologies of Blockchain, Values of Blockchain and Blockchain Use Cases. Blockchain Business includes four chapters — Blockchain’s Uses in Business, The Blockchain Business, Cryptocurrencies and ICOs.

The Lisk Academy currently features more than 40,000 words of premium content, and over 50 infographics and animations to keep learning fun. The goal of the Lisk Academy is to raise awareness of blockchain technology, as well as increase acceleration and adoption of this technology.

Looking ahead, the Lisk Academy will also feature a Blockchain Builders module, covering how to develop blockchain applications and support them. Jacob explained his belief that using gamification to teach blockchain will also be incredibly helpful, especially in teaching blockchain technology to younger people. Jacob also presented an incredibly informative video about blockchain.

The Lisk Academy also has future plans to sponsor educational meetups for both developers and blockchain beginners. There are also discussions regarding an accredited Lisk diploma for learners to demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of blockchain technology with the help of the Lisk Academy.

Development Update

The final segment of the evening was a development panel discussion featuring Lisk co-founder, Vice President and CTO Oliver, Fullstack Developer Will Clark and Cryptographer Iker Alustiza.

The discussion opened with a very informative video explaining the Lisk platform, sidechains and the SDK.

Oliver explained the motivation behind the development of Lisk Core 1.0.0. He explained that what Lisk wants to achieve is a truly scalable and accessible blockchain app platform. The goals of Lisk Core 1.0.0 are to design and implement a new API, rewrite the peer to peer transport layer, rewrite the database layer to support fully atomic block writes, add a 64 byte data field to our type 0 transaction type, and form a standards team within Lisk HQ.

Lisk Core 1.0.0 has been a tough but rewarding process with incredible statistics — 375 merged pull requests, 323 closed issues, 36 contributors, and 3020 commits (which is more than all previous releases put together). And finally, Oliver revealed that the world can expect an open beta release within the next 4–6 weeks.

Following the release, further modularization work will take place, which will involve decoupling the various parts of Lisk Core into pluggable components. This will form the basis of the SDK and the blockchain application platform.

The focus then moved to Iker, who spoke about Lisk’s plans for a new and greatly improved fee system. This is what he has been working on for the past few weeks — a scalable and dynamic fee system. The new fee system is going to be the main priority for the Core team after the successful release of Core 1.0.0.

Will discussed Lisk Elements, a JavaScript library which gives developers access to Lisk-related functionalities. Lisk Elements contains the following components: transactions, API, Constants, Cryptography, Passphrases.

Will then moved on to describe Lisk Commander and what we can expect from it in the future. Lisk Commander, which gives a basic set of commands that developers will want to use when interacting with the Lisk network, to be the primary interface for dapp development. There will be packages within Lisk Elements for creating sidechains, and once we have the functionality, there will be a command in Lisk Commander to provide a nice interface to get going from the Command line with sidechain development.

Oliver provided an overview of the steps it takes to go from a simple idea to a realized app. The steps are the following:

Generate your own white label sidechain.
Customize your sidechain.
From sidechain to application.
Test, deploy and promote your app.
If you would like to read in much more depth about these steps, please visit the Products page on our website.

Oliver explained technical components in-depth, such as the fact that Lisk sidechains are essentially API-driven backend applications, similar to Lisk Core itself, therefore developers will have freedom to choose how their users will interface with their sidechain. The SDK will provide an out-of-the-box framework for writing automated tests against your sidechain code. Lisk will also be developing standards and best practices for testing blockchain applications effectively.

Internal Updates and Closing Remarks

After an incredibly in-depth and technical panel discussion, Max took to the stage for a final presentation. He provided the audience with an update on the latest company financials. The Lisk Foundation has a total value of 300,000,000 CHF. He moved the discussion to open source projects, such as Jon Gros-Dubois’ SocketCluster and Vitaly Tomilov’s Pg.promise. Both of these individuals are incredibly talented developers and huge assets to Lisk. Lisk has great plans to bring on much more talented staff, with a hope to double in size in 2018 alone. We have many open positions; if any of these positions captivate you, please apply here (https://lisk.io/careers).

Following the conclusion of Max’s presentation, the entire Lisk team, as well as all of the contractors Lisk worked with to make the Relaunch a reality, took to the stage. It was such an inspiration to stand on that stage and feel the energy that permeated the room on Tuesday evening.

But there was one more thing we had saved for the very end of the evening — a video created by Element E, a film production company, which we hope will inspire people everywhere to become blockchain creators.

After the presentation portion of the evening concluded, Max and other team members were interviewed by various publications who flew into Berlin for the big event.

Our guests, comprised of community members, journalists, friends and family, had the chance to meet the Lisk Team and network over drinks and finger food. Before we bid farewell to our wonderful attendees, we gifted each and every one of them with a Lisk goodie bag, which included our official Lisk branded gear- a t-shirt, a drawstring bag, stickers and a water bottle.