Q&A: What’s the significance of a new mainnet for a blockchain project?

This crypto project has just undergone a huge transformation.

Lisk has launched a brand-new mainnet, and now, attention is turning to the implementation of its long-awaited interoperability solution.

Here, Lisk’s CEO Max Kordek brings us up to speed on the big changes that have been introduced.

1. Hello Max! First up, tell us in brief what Lisk is all about.

Lisk provides everything a developer requires to build decentralized applications based on their own native blockchain or how we call them blockchain applications.

Once built, the goal is to provide an interoperability solution which enables these blockchain applications to be connected to the Lisk blockchain, to facilitate seamless and trustless token transfers between them.

That would be then the end product of what Lisk is all about, being a blockchain application platform. At this point the interoperability solution is fully researched and is currently in development.

2. What are the benefits that Mainnet v3 delivers?

The new Lisk Mainnet was migrated to its latest version 3 on August 21. It’s the culmination of three years of hard work. Essentially, the entire Lisk protocol was upgraded to be more efficient, more scalable, more decentralized, more secure, and cheaper to be used.

Our new address system provides more security guarantees to the user. Our new DPoS consensus algorithm makes the network more decentralized and enables new validators to earn block rewards in a much fairer way. Our new fee system makes transactions on the network up to 98.6% cheaper. Our new BFT consensus algorithm guarantees block finality after around 20 minutes, so that a user can be 100% certain that a transaction will never be reverted again.

This is especially important when you are dealing with an interoperability solution, such as cross-blockchain transactions.

That means we are dealing with an upgrade on all aspects of the Lisk Mainnet. Pushing us to the same level or beyond our competitors.

3. Can you tell us the main weaknesses that have been addressed through the upgrade?

The main weaknesses were that:

Each Lisk account needed to be initialized to be fully secure by sending at least one outgoing transaction. With v3 this is not needed anymore!

The Lisk Mainnet was held hostage by two cartels which with the help of voting groups became the major validators on the network. With v3 this is fixed! Cartels cannot form anymore and are a thing of the past.

The fees for sending transactions were extremely high (at $4 per LSK token, approximately 40 cents). With v3 they became up to 98.6% cheaper, now you can send transactions for less than 1 cent.

All of these weaknesses are eradicated, setting up the Lisk Mainnet for the next stage - Lisk Interoperability and the launch of the Lisk blockchain application platform.

4. Account addresses have changed as a result of the migration. What does this mean for users?

The user has nothing to worry about. Everything was migrated automatically and the same passphrase can be used to sign into their accounts.

With the new address system users have major advantages. On the one hand, the initialization requirement falls away as already mentioned. On the other hand, thanks to an included checksum in the address you cannot send your LSK tokens to an address with a typo in it anymore. That would be detected and stopped by the system, making it very safe to send transactions around.

5. Lisk’s network can now handle one million transactions per day — and fees are up to 98% cheaper. Are you expecting a spike in demand now?

Definitely! Currently all exchanges are still updating their implementations to Lisk v3, that means they didn’t activate their withdrawals and deposits for the LSK token yet. Due to this the overall transaction count is currently still lower than before the migration because regular balance transfer transactions represent the majority of transactions happening on our network. However, we already see a large increase in the usage of other transaction types, e.g. to register a validator (i.e. delegate) on the network or to stake LSK tokens (i.e. vote for a delegate). Here, we see an increase in demand already today.

Due to the great performance of our network, I foresee the fees to stay very cheap for a long time. We already tested our scalability capabilities and could ramp up the network transaction processing capabilities to far over six million transactions per day. However, we deemed that not necessary at the current time.

6. This upgrade also promises total immutability for users. What does this mean?

Our ultimate vision is to launch the Lisk blockchain application platform that connects multiple blockchain applications with each other through the Lisk blockchain. When handling multiple blockchains and transferring tokens from one to another, we have to be very careful about individual forks on the different blockchains.

That’s where our new Lisk BFT consensus algorithm comes into play which guarantees block finality. With that after an average of 20 minutes blocks and all their transactions become final, no fork or block reshuffling can occur after that.

This is extremely important later on because our users will then be able to send tokens from one blockchain to another without having to worry about security issues. It’s an essential puzzle piece of our later blockchain application platform.

7. You had a party to celebrate Mainnet v3’s arrival. What was that like?

That was an experiment. Instead of doing a stiff event with studied presentations, we had a celebration of sorts. A super relaxed and fun live streamed event with balloons and confetti, alcohol free beverages, countdowns, panel discussions and explanations. Everything conducted from our Lisk Center Berlin.

In contrast to Lisk.js or Lisk Updates, the Lisk Mainnet Party was down to earth, I liked it for that. We will see if we bring that format back for the launch of our interoperability solution.

8. What’s coming ahead in the Sapphire phase of your roadmap?

The Sapphire phase you could argue is our most important phase overall. Now that the Emerald phase is concluded our Lisk blockchain is on the same level and in some cases even above our competitors in terms of security, stability, scalability and usability. With Sapphire we are now adding the final missing piece, interoperability, to Lisk. With that our blockchain application platform will go live and will allow our developer community to connect their blockchain applications built with the Lisk SDK to the Lisk ecosystem to facilitate trustless token transfers.

What lies ahead is the implementation of our interoperability solution, after the reveal of all its research at Lisk.js 2021 in May. The work has already begun and we are looking towards a beta version next year.

9. And lastly, tell us about the interoperability solution that’s in the works?

The Lisk interoperability solution will enable trustless token transfers from one blockchain application to another, i.e. from one blockchain to another blockchain. This marks the launch of the Lisk blockchain application platform.

Our Lisk SDK enables any JavaScript developer to rapidly build a secure and scalable blockchain application. We have seen developers in our community building a simple blockchain within an hour and more complex use-cases within days. Today everything is ready to let developers build amazing use-cases utilizing blockchain technology; like DAOs, NFT marketplaces, collectibles, lending platforms, stablecoins or decentralized exchanges. However, at this stage they would be isolated blockchain applications, that’s where our interoperability solution comes into play.