Thursday, December 31, 2020

Lisk 2020 - Year in Review

Hey there,

it's time for our Year in Review blog post.

2020 is coming to an end and we would like to take this opportunity to summarize our most important accomplishments this year. There has been a multitude of research and development achievements, as well as other important milestones reached. We published a blog post that covers the highlights of Lisk in 2020, from the research on interoperability to the opening of Lisk Center Berlin. At the end of this blog post, we will cover as well some of the things we are most excited about for 2021.

Read the entire blog post here

Development

Platform

The Lisk development achievements in 2020 were impressive. So far, we have more than 2600 Lisk SDK downloads on npm. On the GitHub repositories, we had more than 19,500 commits and we implemented 35 LIPs (Lisk Improvement Proposals) in our codebase. All these great accomplishments make Lisk one of the most actively developed blockchains in the entire industry.

User Interface

Lisk for Desktop is the primary application for interacting with the Lisk blockchain. In 2020 we had 5 releases bringing the following new features and improvements:

The graphical statistics to the monitoring features and the dark mode theme introduced by version 1.24.0.
Desktop notifications and support of Betanet v3 introduced in Lisk for Desktop version 1.25.0.
The network statistics and graphical overview of transactions introduced with version 1.26.0.
Several design improvements fixing usability issues were implemented. Some of these changes include a unified navigation menu, better use of modal screens, a more visible network switcher, and others in Lisk for Desktop version 1.27.0.

Lisk Service

In September 2020, we released a new product as part of the Lisk ecosystem - Lisk Service. This product offers the possibility to access and browse Lisk's blockchain data by providing accessible and powerful new API calls. Lisk Service, fully written in JavaScript, acts as a service layer between blockchain data and user interfaces. It can be used with any blockchain application built with the Lisk SDK.

Research

In 2020 we completed the research of the four protocol roadmap phases "Security and Reliability", "Network Economics", "Network Consensus", and "Network Longevity". In total, there were 35 LIPs completed and merged into GitHub.

This year has been a very important one for the research on interoperability. Since the beginning of 2020, the team started the research for the last phase of our roadmap: "Blockchain Interoperability". The general high-level direction for Lisk Interoperability was presented during Lisk Updates 2020 online event. With the direction set, the research team drafted the interoperability specifications and reached a conclusion recently. The last milestone for the research team is to write all LIPs for the interoperability solution for Lisk, which will be published at Lisk.js in spring 2021.

Marketing

The Lisk marketing efforts in 2020 were strongly focused on developers. We have been supporting the development of proof of concept blockchain applications built by community members, in order to showcase the possible use cases for Lisk SDK. Besides attracting new developers in our ecosystem, we have been also working hard on engaging with our existing community. We opened up two new Lisk Centers; one in Berlin and the other in Tokyo, which will facilitate collaborations between blockchain developers. We have also been more engaged with our community members on social media channels and Lisk.chat through regular updates and AMAs (Ask Me Anything). In 2020 we hosted 10 live AMAs for diverse topics and we published 74 blog posts on the official Lisk blog. These blog posts cover monthly achievements, proof of concept blockchain applications, Lisk research-related topics, releases, and much more.