For several months now, part of the team at Journal Du Coin has been assiduously following the evolution of Lisk project. After introducing the project in an article, we recently had the pleasure of talking with brilliant Lindsay Buescher, Marketing Manager at Lisk. This interview is an exclusive Journal Du Coin, made possible thanks to the accessibility of LiskHQ/Lightcurve team that I would like to personally thank for the professionalism they have shown since the beginning of our exchanges.
Hello Lindsay Buescher, and thank you for this interview! Can you briefly introduce yourself and Lisk ?
My pleasure! Thank you for reaching out. I began working at Lightcurve as a MarketingManager exactly one year ago. My professional background spans over 10 years with aspecial focus on performance marketing. You could say blockchain has taken over my life, so I do spend a fair amount of time researching projects in my spare time. Having been interested in crypto and blockchain for several years, I joined Lisk as I saw an opportunity for the project to solve scalability challenges faced by other platforms. Lisk is a blockchain application platform, based on its own network and token (LSK), offering a framework for developers to easily build and deploy custom dapps. What makes Lisk unique from other blockchain application platforms lies in the ability for developers to customize their own blockchain as a sidechain.
First tricky question: do you know the website “Le Journal du Coin”, which deals, in French, about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology ?
I’ve actually been familiar with Le Journal du Coin for quite a while since we have many community members based in France and Belgium. Although I studied French for four years in high school, my ability to understand everything I read in French is a topic for another discussion.
The LiskHQ teams have recently moved to new a location, and your new offices can now accommodate hundreds of people. Should we expect to see your team grow again this year ?
Yes, that is correct. We moved into a brand new office within the WeWork Atrium Tower in Berlin, that accommodates 160 people. To give you a better impression of our growth, eight new employees were onboarded in the month of July and there are at least nine more employees in the pipeline to start in August and September. Our hiring goals are quite ambitious as we hope to increase the Lightcurve headcount to at least 80 by December.
You have been one of the first to implement an alternative to the proof of work consensus (PoW) called delegated proof of stake (DPoS). Could you please explain us this choice ?
It is often argued that DPoS is the next step in the evolution of consensus protocols by drastically increasing speed and scalability of blockchains. These are two important factors for Lisk because we are building a blockchain application platform for dapps toscale. Not only can DPoS be a more democratic system, but it also has the capability to be more efficient in terms of speed and energy usage. When it comes to speed, DPoS systems are much faster than traditional PoW and PoS systems. For example, the selection of block producers allows for transactions on Lisk to be validated in 10
seconds, rather than 10 minutes on Bitcoin’s PoW system. Energy efficiency is another strong case for choosing DPoS when comparing the costs and environmental impact that is often criticized with PoW hashing algorithms. Consensus protocols are highly sensitive and heavily debated in the industry. I’m happy to say that these discussions are stimulating innovation at Lisk where our dedicated Science Team (Iker, Jan and Andries) is working to optimize our DPoS consensus protocol.
The release of the new Lisk Core 1.0 is one of the greatest achievements of your development teams ! Could you reveal your roadmap for future developments?
It certainly is the milestone we’ve all been anticipating. Lisk Core is the application that implements the protocol, enabling participation in the network. Many significant changes come with Lisk Core 1.0 including, but definitely not limited to the completely new and improved Lisk API. Max, Oliver, the development team and the science team are preparing the product development roadmap, which will be revealed and communicated transparently after the release of Lisk Core 1.0.
Recent developments have required months of work. Do you think that communication on more modest goals isn’t a more agile alternative ?
You are absolutely right. Several valuable lessons were learned with the release of LiskCore 1.0. Internally we have already made structural changes on the team to accommodate a more agile development approach. From a communications perspective, it is very important to us to keep our community up-to-date about our development progress and for that reason we have a weekly development update on Lisk Blog . After Core 1.0, development team is planning bi-weekly release cycles with a minor release every other week. Upcoming development roadmap will reflect a prioritized list of feature rollouts and protocol optimizations.
Transaction fees are currently of 0.1 LSK per transaction. The cost to improve our Lisk wallet security is 5 LSK. We are talking about dynamic fees and a change in the registration fees. Would you like to tell us more?
Iker Alustiza, from our Science Team, has revealed his strategies for the dynamic fee system on Lisk’s subreddit. Until Lisk Core 1.0 is released to mainnet, I cannot reveal more at this point in time.
What is your view of the actual use cases of blockchain applications? In your opinion, is the technology mature enough to be adopted by the big industry?
We are still in the nascent stages of blockchain real world usage. As a reality check, the top five dapps on Ethereum are averaging 1,244 daily active users and 17,603 monthly active users as of today. We are far from mainstream adoption, but despite that, there are plenty of breakthroughs taking place. For example, IBM is using blockchain to monitor carbon offsets in China and the National Agency of Public Registry is storing land registry titles in Georgia on the blockchain.
Blockchain industry is not quite mature enough for widespread adoption, however, several enterprises such as IBM , SAP and Microsoft are already offering blockchain solutions. I would argue that two of the biggest hurdles for enterprises adopting blockchain today are legacy infrastructures and legal complexities of regulations.
Have you ever been contacted by firms that would like to start developing on Lisk blockchain? If so, can you tell us more?
Yes, we receive many inquiries every week and that is one of the (many) reasons why we are building out a Business Development team at Lightcurve.
Last question but not least. During Lisk Relaunch event last February, we were able to see employees of Kraken company. Exclusively for “Journal du Coin“ website and for French speaking Lisk community, can you confirm that this exchange will list soon the LSK token on its platform?
Lisk has had ongoing conversations with a few of the major exchanges that we’re not currently listed on. Kraken is one of those exchanges. Some of these exchanges may bewaiting for the Lisk Core 1.0 release to mainnet in order to avoid the migration. As mentioned above, we are building out a Business Development team who will also be responsible for managing exchanges. We currently have a business development intern who has made great progress in the last month, streamlining communication channels and setting up a structure for the team.
Thanks Lindsay for taking time to answer our questions, thanks also to Mat and Liskpro for making this interview possible.
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