Last we checked on Lisk they’d just launched a new version of Lisk Hub interface. Since then, it’s been full steam ahead and quite a bit more ground has been covered.
The month of May saw numerous developments and notable pieces of news. As we move toward the end of June, it’s time to recap and bring you up to speed on all the most relevant Lisk news.
Need a Lisk refresher? Check out our beginner’s guide.
Development Update
On May 24, Lisk celebrated the 2-year anniversary of its mainnet, quite old in crypto-relative terms. The team also made sure to highlight the fact that over 200,000 wallets had been created in the last month, no small achievement.
2 years into existence, and the Lisk Github remains as busy as ever.
On the development front, what interests most people is how things are going in the engine room, i.e. what progress is being made on Lisk core. As of June 15, Lisk core 1.0 is in beta testing and the team released this full status update. Here’s the thumbnail of it – recent QA efforts resolved a large number of issues, and the final round of beta testing shouldn’t take much more than a week to complete, thus paving the way for a testnet announcement.
CEO Max Kordek also recently announced some organizational reshuffling that could have real implications for future development. The upshot of it is that Max and co-founder Oliver Beddows are redividing their responsibilities to manage only the part(s) of the project where their expertise will be most useful (interfaces and engineering respectively). The same post also mentioned that a mobile version of the Lisk app is in the works and a team is being assembled to tackle that.
Recent weeks also brought the news that Lisk was ranked third in a global public-owned chain technology assessment index by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (CCID). This was the first assessment of its kind in China, and if you’re curious about the methodology involved in this rating process, check out this post.
Rounding out the development news was the release of Lisk Explorer 1.6.1, which included user interface fixes and minor functional improvements.
Here’s a Github visual.
Marketing Update
Since the relaunch (rebrand if you like) in February, Lisk has been continuing to build their brand behind consistent and professional marketing efforts. Lisk now has around 15 full-time marketing, community management and creative staff (with more open positions), and it shows.
May saw the Lisk foundation web page launched. The slick, new page allows anyone to view its mission statement, spending forecast, and financials, and generally learn about the foundation. The Lisk website itself also now boasts a press and media page (and a downloadable kit), a professional and proactive step.
Lisk has also been extremely active in terms of recent conference attendance and participation. The last few months saw them with a presence at Chainges, Consensus, JSconf, WeAreDevs, and the Blockshow. More conference appearances and meetups are on the books, including Tech Open Air (which Lisk is sponsoring). Getting to a lot of events is a solid strategy for recruiting new talent and, of course, continuing to promote Lisk. To check the full schedule of upcoming events click here.
Lisk has also started publishing monthly vlog updates in an effort to keep the community updated and to spread their message. The most recent installment can be viewed below:
Community Update
By all accounts, the Lisk community remains healthy despite some of the travails of the last 6 months. Lisk’s Reddit has close to 30,000 members and the LiskHQ Telegram channel is pushing 5k subscribers.
Management seems to listen to legitimate feedback and are pushing a variety of initiatives and giveaways that recognize the value of the Lisk community. The continued frequency (and popularity) of Lisk meetups is another positive indicator on the community side of things. In May, Bloqspace conducted the very first Lisk workshop in San Antonio.
A final piece of news worth mentioning is that Lisk was just listed on one of the world’s biggest digital asset exchanges, OKEx, welcome news for anyone concerned about volume. The newly established trading pairs will be LSK/BTC, LSK/ETH, and LSK/USD.
Final Thoughts
In the intervening weeks and months since our last update a lot has happened over at LiskHQ and from many perspectives, things are humming along just fine. But if you look at the price, you probably wouldn’t know it.
The price of LSK has sagged to a low of $6.39, which makes it hard to fathom that a few months ago it was soaring at $38.
Like any coin not named Bitcoin or Ethereum, Lisk is subject to bull and bear trends that are, to some extent, out of its hands. To what degree the current price of Lisk is a reflection of a brutal market or repeated delays/DPoS issues remains to be seen.
But the overall consensus seems to be one of resignation to the fact that if you truly believe in the project you might have to simply look away from the price for a while. Then again, if there is anything about crypto that’s predictable is that it’s unpredictable. Lisk may only be a release or two and a bull run away from getting back “on track.”
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