Max Kordek on Lisk's layer 1 protocol and javascript development

0:00i'm ashton anderson from block west capital for investment pitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews with max kordak the ceo and co-founder of lisk max welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today hey ashton thanks for having me pleasure to be here you're very welcome i'm excited to dive

0:19into the world of lisk protocol i know your team has been working on this for a long time there's a lot to it and there's some great applications that are coming out and i'm really excited to dive into the details and i would love for you to kick it off for us by just giving us a little bit of information about lisk the protocol and some of the solutions that your team is driving into

0:39the cryptocurrency space and then we can dive into the details yeah sure so lisk is i would say an og project of the crypto scene we're around since 2016 but had some starting problems so i would say we actually around since 2019 that's when we hired our research team and had or introduced our research led effort at list we basically have two products

1:05you could say we have the sdk and we have the platform and the sdk is targeted towards developers to make it easy to build their own blockchain applications so similar like a d app but which is natively built on its own blockchain and the platform itself then would have the goal to combine these various blockchain applications with each other's through a common

1:27interoperability protocol we always thought okay there's so many javascript developers out there we have to somehow target that specific group of developers and that's why all our tools are built completely in javascript and we think experimentation is extremely important so that's why we built this sdk to let developers experiment with blockchain technology and i think out of

1:51these experiments eventually startups occur and we thought like okay if we give them the tools they're all going to build their own blockchains they're all going to build their own solutions however we feel like a connected ecosystem is so much more powerful that's why we also decided to build this platform we call it a blockchain application platform which then yeah

2:16connects all these blockchain applications with each others in order to leverage their own or that each of their utility aspects and which allows for stronger or more powerful combinations on the platform definitely great introduction max and yeah it's interesting to see lisk i saw i've been following lis since 2016 back when you first started it and

2:42boy the industry has changed dramatically i'm curious if you have a perspective on the industry growth and how lisk grew with that starting the protocol back when there wasn't a lot of d5 there wasn't a lot of capital injection into the industry nor nfts and did that growth of the industry in a certain direction play a role within lisk growing or having to make any changes

3:06yeah yeah definitely so when we started in 2016 venture capitalists really didn't discovered blockchain yet and so we had more like a grassroot effort just retail investors doing our ico and unfortunately for the first two years we were struggling a bit because it took us just one year to find a jurisdiction in which we can create a legal entity now we are based in switzerland however

3:32then what we saw is that over the years the space or the industry itself got more professional and that means more capital flowed into it and more well venture capitalists were interested suddenly and that's how other projects i think came around heavily supported by venture capitalists like polkadot or cosmos which then have maybe the same goal as list but with a different

3:58community or with a different background and yeah back in the day d5 was not a term game fi was not a term the different ideas of tokens nfts decentralized exchanges they all exist existed of course already but it was by no means as big as it is today and today we really have to find a niche or a unique

4:26value proposition for our platform to really stand out and one of the aspects is just the ease of use and the accessibility with javascript and just a heavy focus on development user experience but overall the industry just changed towards to become very saturated you know there's so many smart contra platforms so many blockchain application platforms

4:47out there and i think that's why it's so important to introduce interoperability to all of these platforms because well that's just how the world is there will always be a multitude of options available no matter where you look where you're looking and that's where it's just important to just leverage the technology by connecting the different ecosystems

5:09with each other's you know and that's exactly what we're now doing and that was actually still part of our original vision for lisk itself but just well encapsulated within the list ecosystem but now we are adding or we added one roadmap phase where we're also branching out to other platforms where we're getting connected to the ethereum ecosystem to the pokedot ecosystem and

5:32so on i think that's a crucial step for the future because you cannot have these island solutions you cannot just just yesterday i talked with some people who were pretty new to crypto and they have they held like multiple cryptocurrencies on exchange i told them hey you should get them off the exchange but then they were asking me okay but

5:54which wallet should i get and they had like 20 currencies and they all needed different wallets you know and that's not the way to go so i think like a connected ecosystem where you have one place to enter is really crucial and that's where we are more and more heading towards i'm currently like drafting up a new vision for lisp with my partner because we were still

6:16working on the original one but this list interoperability is coming now it's fully researched everything's published it's over 30 it's over 20 research papers and it's now in the implementation phase so it's time for something new for something fresh which we're going to reveal next year so yeah a lot is moving a lot of strategy and our original vision is of

6:38course by far yeah outdated and that's why this refreshed but it's super interesting how the industry overall developed over the years definitely very exciting to hear that i'm looking forward to that new paper and you were speaking about javascript and how it's used to develop on lisk and i know javascript is one of the most popular programming languages in the

7:03world which is obviously going to help with developers but there are so many smart contracting protocols to develop on that it can be a hard choice and i'm curious if that's helped with bringing bringing developers to lisk and also if there are other incentivizations or programs to help developers move and develop applications on lisk yeah i would say javascript

7:28definitely helps as our biggest unique selling point or part of our value proposition for developers however of course you really have to put a big focus on user and developer experience as well the language itself doesn't cut it there but i always like to say one example like if a company wants to do something with blockchain technology and they're

7:49looking to hire a team well mostly they look to first hire internally and it's probably more likely that a company has javascript developers already in there in contrast to let's say solidity developers also a javascript developer is much much cheaper than a solidity developer because like i see now rates like reaching into the thousands for one day of work for solidity developers so

8:14that's already becoming quite crazy so we have quite some advantages with that however really the whole blockchain industry is so saturated by now with different like you said smart contract platforms or blockchain application platforms like ours that this alone is not enough we really have to put in proper incentivization programs in place in order to attract developers and in

8:41our case we have every quarter one hackathon we call it hack on lisk in which we are giving prices the first one was around thirty three thousand dollars in price is the second one now which is currently running is has a total price money of 60 000 us so it's quite high prices in order to attract developers into our ecosystem to just play around with the risk sdk and

9:08Next to that we are also having a grand program how we call it in which we're incentivizing developers with around 65 000 to build a blockchain application on the production application platform and currently we have two applicants from the first wave the second wave is currently running so we're evaluating the applications there and yeah it's

9:31pretty interesting to see that people from all over the world are either participating in the hackathon or applying for the grant program and really want to join this because they believe into the protocol and they believe into the project in the ecosystem but in most cases i think it's that they saw its javascript and they played around with it so that the

9:55developer experience is like so easy and i would say dramatically more easy than from our competitors and that's why they take the next step they then participate in hack-on-disc and then they're applying for the grant program join our community on discord and i hope then in the coming months and years really create a startup a company around that and

10:20well become part of the ecosystem very cool and yeah it's great to hear that you have the hackathon and that developers are incentivized and there's actually grant money to develop on lisk so that's great to be supporting the ecosystem through that and i'm also curious on with the dapps being developed on lisk how does the lisk network token play a role in the ecosystem is it used

10:48for the development or are there other functionalities of the lisk network token yeah so i mentioned very briefly our roadmap before so currently we are in the sapphire roadmap phase and that's where we are implementing our interoperability protocol which allows then basically all these different blockchain applications living on their own native

11:10blockchain to communicate with each others and to send let's say data information to each others but also tokens and the next phase of our roadmap is called diamond and that's the way we are branching out to other ecosystems like ethereum polka dot cosmos and so on where you can do the same thing and the tokens utility aspect is on the one side of course living on the list

11:35blockchain and being part of the governance of it so we are based on delegated proof of stake where you can vote in validators or delegates or we call them in order to well secure the blockchain and generate new blocks and that's something you do with your lsk stake you can also well use it of course for transaction fees that's the second use case or second utility on the

11:59list blockchain itself however the most interesting aspect now comes into play with the different blockchain applications so of course the developer has complete freedom in how they design their blockchain application they can either choose to use the lsk token for their fees on their blockchain app or they can create a new token and what we really want to

12:25get developers into is to just use the lsk token because it's very complicated to have your own token you have to well legally take care of many many things like we as a swiss foundation are being audited every year on the same level as a bank so that's quite a big entry barrier i would say to have a token but also you really have to put a lot of effort and money into

12:47like creating a market for it you know that's not easy so we really want to motivate our developers in the ecosystem to not create their own token to use their skate openers for the feast and that means the third utility aspect then is to pay for all these transaction fees inside all these blockchain applications on top of that you will also always require lsk token in order

13:12to pay the fee to go from one blockchain to another blockchain so for the interoperability protocol you need it as well and then of course like with d5 people are going to build used cases where you need to lock up your tokens as collateral or to provide liquidity and that of course as well but essentially like this is the main functionality for the lsk tokens to pay

13:36for these transaction fees on the list blockchain and all the blockchain applications and for the interoperability aspect great thanks max and yeah you keep touching on the interoperability it seems like that's obviously going to be something huge for lisk moving forward and i'm curious in your future road map if you can just touch on the major highlights of what's

13:59the next big thing between the end of the year or maybe it's in the starting of 2022 that are the next big things to come out for lisk yeah so we are currently i think in the middle of a whole because we just released list version 3 which we worked on for three years and it was a substantial update so essentially every part of the protocol was touched we introduced a new feed

14:26system a new id or address system a new consensus algorithm a new bft consensus algorithm as well in order to have block finalization which means after 20 minutes approximately it's a hundred percent certain that the transaction is confirmed which is important if you do cross chain transactions we introduce a new multi-signature scheme like so

14:47many things okay and with that like the biggest milestone so far is just behind us however we didn't stop in may we introduced our interoperability protocol with over 20 research papers and we're now implementing that we foresee that we can implement it by next year and then of course this very long let's say phase of

15:15union a or testing begins this is always the most challenging period and not the implementation but actually the testing of the implementation that's the next year and i think that's the next biggest milestone and that will be the conclusion from of the ico promise my partner oliver battles and myself gave back in 2016. that's essentially where we say

15:39after seven years then we did it we delivered what we promised seven years ago you know yeah and that's exactly why we're currently like sketching out a new vision something bigger something random because the industry developed forward and we just yeah we're not competitive enough anymore with the six year old vision of course so that's where we are

16:04currently in however yeah interoperability is the next big thing within lisk and then the next big thing after that is interoperability towards other ecosystems but that's mostly on the protocol side of thing and i think like that's becoming more and more secondary cardano polkadot cosmos ethereum they all have great protocols you know and i think what's

16:32now becoming more and more important is the ecosystem around on the one side how easy it is for new users to be onboarded into your ecosystem that's where maybe your website your wallets play a big role the number of exchanges where they can acquire the tokens plays a role but also the community itself which is always there as a helping hand if new joiners

16:56have questions so that's becoming very important and then also the number of production applications being built within the ecosystem because i what we see is that each blockchain application is somewhat of a multiplier they all attract their own little community and of course they join the disc community as well so these factors become more and more

17:17important so not really what's the next big thing for our protocol but rather what's the next big thing for our ecosystem overall and that's yeah i think becomes very interesting next year because we just launched the sdk into production with the hackathons we're just starting to attract developers into our ecosystem with the grant we're just incentivizing

17:44them to build something within our ecosystem so we're just at the very beginning and that means for entrepreneurs and developers it's like sherry picking they can just cherry pick like the best use cases of other ecosystems and put them over into ours and while they're going to be like the first movers and will have big advantages over their competitions then

18:05within our ecosystem so it's really an interesting time and i think it's the perfect moment for javascript developers to join us and to play around but also to build something substantial with our sdk definitely oh it does sound like a great time and if there are developers or just users that are looking to look into the apps built look into the d5 the staking

18:30start developing on lisk what's the best way for the community to get involved in lisk and to learn more yeah it's super simple basically everyone just has to well take a look at our website if they're a developer definitely just head to our documentation so list dot com slash documentation there you're gonna find everything you need to know to use our risk sdk

18:55everyone else i would suggest also to join developers of course as well to join our discord server that's where our main community is living essentially and they always can help you out with questions so that would be the starting point i guess the documentation and our discord server and well then it's about installing our wallets acquiring a

19:21tiny amount of tokens to play around with the network it's insanely cheap now so you can use everything and spend like 10 cents so yeah i think that would be a good start great thank you so much max i will leave those links as well in the description box below all the best with the upcoming roadmap for lisk i'm excited to see how it plays out and let's follow up in the

19:44near future yeah definitely thank you so much for having me and yeah looking forward to be back on the show again