Meet the New Lisk Mainnet

We are proud to announce that on August, 21st 2021, at 2:00 pm CEST, the Lisk Mainnet v2 successfully completed the migration to Lisk Mainnet v3. This comprises the biggest protocol changes on the Lisk blockchain ever, and marks the beginning of a whole new era for the Lisk network as it eliminates all weaknesses of the Lisk Mainnet v2 related to fees, consensus algorithm and accounts, and also prepares and improves the Lisk blockchain for the upcoming interoperability release in many regards.

What does this mean for me?

This section provides an overview of the new and updated features which are now available on the new Lisk Mainnet v3.

1. New Account System

Did you know that with Lisk v3 you have an extremely secure new account address system, with built-in error detection for typos? No need for account initialization anymore! We give our community complete security.

The old address and ID system is replaced and all existing accounts will be automatically migrated to the new system. This introduces a longer address which makes it much more unlikely to experience address collisions and ensures that it is resistant to preimage attacks. In addition, it also eliminates the need to initialize a new account, as was required in the old Mainnet v2, ensuring that every new account in the Lisk network is completely secure right from the start.

The following credentials of your account have not changed:

• Your private key
• Your Public Key
• Your 12 word mnemonic passphrase

Hence, you can still use your old passphrase to log in to Lisk Desktop as before.

The following credentials of your account have changed:

• Your Lisk address

The new address is created from the public key as described in the illustration shown below. Please note that we now append a checksum of the address at the end of the address, which provides support for detecting typos in the account addresses.

Thanks to the checksum depicted in the above illustration, a user can mistype up to 4 characters in the address, and it is guaranteed that the application will detect it. It does not matter if the errors are introduced in the checksum part, and/or the part that represents the 160-bits address.

All important information about the new address and ID system can be found in the blog post: The new Lisk ID System.

2. Dynamic Fee System

Did you know that with Lisk v3 transactions are up to 98,64% cheaper? Instead of 0.1 LSK the new minimum fee is now only 0.00136 LSK. We give our community competitive fees.

The new dynamic fee system replaces the static fees and makes sending transactions significantly cheaper. It also enables users to overwrite their transactions in the transaction pool (i.e. transactions which are not included in the block yet), by setting a higher fee and the same nonce as the transaction they wish to overwrite. The minimum fee of each transaction is always burned to secure the system against various game theoretic attack scenarios.

More information about dynamic fees can be found in the following blog posts: Lisk's Dynamic Fee System and Static vs Dynamic Fee System: A Comparison of Both.

3. Revamped DPoS Consensus Algorithm

Did you know that with Lisk v3 the DPoS consensus algorithm received an entire revamp? A fair network, new validators, and no more cartels. We give our community fair decentralization.

The DPoS consensus algorithm has been completely redesigned to improve the decentralization and security of the validator selection algorithm. This includes a completely new voting mechanism, two additional randomly selected delegates per forging round, and a new punishing mechanism for malicious delegates.

Please note that all previous votes for delegates have not been migrated to the new Lisk Mainnet v3, and every account needs to recast their votes for their favorite delegates.

More information can be found in the following blog post: Actions Required for the Upcoming Mainnet Migration.

A list of the most important features in the DPoS new consensus algorithm can be viewed in the illustration below:

More information about the new DPoS can be found in the blog post: 3 New DPoS LIPs: Changing the Voting System for Lisk.

4. Total Immutability with Lisk BFT

Did you know that with Lisk v3 you can send a transaction and be certain it never gets reverted again? This is the way forward for future cross-blockchain transactions on our blockchain application platform. We give our community total immutability.

With sidechains and interoperability coming into the Lisk ecosystem in the next major release of Lisk Core v4, blockchain applications will be able to facilitate transactions across multiple blockchains. To achieve this, it is necessary to guarantee that a sent transaction can never be reverted again. That is precisely what our newly implemented Lisk BFT consensus algorithm is doing.

A block will become final on average after 155 blocks or approximately 26 minutes after it was included in the blockchain. If you want to be sure a block is finalized, compare its block height and the finalized height of the blockchain (e.g. check the finalized height with Lisk Desktop or the community-maintained explorers Lisk Observer and Lisk Scan). If the block height of the block is lower than the finalized height, it is 100% ensured that this block and all its contained transactions are final and cannot be reverted or changed again.

All important information about the new Lisk BFT consensus can be found in the following blog posts: Introducing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus for Lisk and Exploring Pre-Votes and Pre-Commits.

5. Significant Performance Improvements

Did you know that with Lisk v3 over 1,000,000 transactions can be processed every day? That is a vast increase of 5 times more than with the previous version. We give our community greater scalability.

The performance of Lisk Core has been improved in multiple regards. The main improvements are listed below:

• Smaller blockchain size: The blockchain data is now stored in a key-value store instead of a Postgres database. Therefore, the required blockchain size has diminished and is now around 10 times smaller.
• Faster query response times: API query response time has improved significantly.
• Faster block processing time: The time required to process a block has decreased on average by 3 times for empty blocks and over 33 times for blocks containing transactions.
• Increased maximum transactions per second (TPS): Byte based blocks allow the inclusion of many more transactions in a block.

Further details about the performance improvements of Lisk Core v3 can be found in the blog post Benchmarking Lisk Core v3.0.0 against Lisk Core v2.1.6.

6. New Modular Architecture

Besides the extensive protocol improvements, there have also been large improvements in the code base of the Lisk SDK, which is also utilized in version 3 of Lisk Core.

The overall development experience has improved greatly by creating a completely modular architecture of the blockchain application, whereby all different components of the application can be changed, extended, or replaced by the developer. 

The Lisk Commander has become a powerful CLI tool, which greatly simplifies the creation of blockchain applications. For example, it is now possible to bootstrap a completely new blockchain application with one single command, or to generate skeletons for new modules, plugins, or assets for a blockchain application.

For more information about the new architecture, and how to develop blockchain applications with the Lisk SDK, check out the Lisk SDK documentation.

Lisk Mainnet Party Recap

In order to celebrate the largest update to the Lisk Mainnet in its history as well as to showcase an overview of all the biggest protocol changes on the Lisk blockchain, and to provide our community with insights into the next steps for Lisk; we organized a Lisk Mainnet Party, a fun and dynamic exclusive online event livestreamed on and Crowdcast. 

The Lisk Mainnet Party was hosted on August 21st live from the stage in the Lisk Center Berlin, as a celebration of Lisk’s greatest achievement to date. The event started with an extensive in-depth presentation of the Lisk Mainnet migration process by Max Kordek, CEO and Co-Founder of Lisk, which covered the main changes and improvements brought by Lisk Core v3. This dynamic event was a great opportunity for the Lisk community to interact with Lisk’s Research, Development, and Marketing teams.

Once the migration block height was finally reached, Max held a casual discussion with Mona Bärenfänger (Technical Writer), Iker Alustiza (Research Scientist), Ishan Tiwari (Backend Developer), and Mitsuaki Uchimoto (Backend Developer), reflecting on the project’s major achievements, exchanging behind-the-scenes stories, and discussing relevant insights into their individual journeys.

After the waiting period for the 201 blocks was over, the snapshot was successfully taken, and the Lisk Mainnet was migrated; then Monica Tartau, Marketing Lead, was invited on stage to discuss this outstanding achievement for Lisk. Monica answered questions from the community regarding the upcoming marketing plans and announced the 10 meme contests winners.

The Lisk Mainnet Party was concluded after Max’s live AMA covering the successful Lisk Mainnet migration, the future of Lisk, and the plans for the upcoming months. 

Outlook: What’s coming next

The successful migration of the Lisk Mainnet v2 marks the end of the “Emerald” phase, and the beginning of the “Sapphire” phase on our Roadmap. With all the above-mentioned improvements in the protocol and code base, the new Lisk Mainnet v3 is perfectly prepared to integrate Lisk’s interoperability solution, which was presented to the public for the first time at Lisk.js this summer. The interoperability is the final key feature missing, which will allow blockchain applications to register as a sidechain. This enables them to interact with the Lisk ecosystem, consisting of the Lisk Mainchain and all other connected sidechains.

Development Focus: Lisk Interoperability

The planning and development of the next major release of the Lisk SDK (v6) and subsequently of Lisk Core (v4) is already progressing at full speed. The release of Lisk Core v4 will bring Lisk’s interoperability solution to the Lisk Mainnet. The current progress can be viewed in real time by following the corresponding projects in our GitHub repositories:

• Lisk SDK projects
• Lisk Core projects

Research Focus: Blockchain Interoperability

So far, 40 LIPs have been published in total. An overview of all existing LIPs can be found in the LIPs repository on GitHub. Apart from the development progress towards interoperability, there are several new research objectives related to interoperability in the pipeline.

The following 10 research objectives are nearly finished and will complete the research phase “Lisk Interoperability”:

• Chain registration
• Cross-chain messages
• Introduce the auth module
• Introduce the fee module
• Proof-of-Authority validator selection mechanism
• Properties, serialization, and initial values of the interoperability module
• Define state and state transitions of the random module
• Define state transitions of the reward module
• Introduce the validators module
• Add weights to Lisk-BFT consensus protocol

The following supporting research objectives are already planned and are part of the research phase “Interoperability Improvements”:

• Reduce time to finality
• Provide relayer incentivization mechanism
• Generalize the transaction fee system

After completing the Sapphire phase which includes the “Lisk Interoperability'' and “Interoperability Improvements'' milestones, the research team will concentrate on the Diamond phase with its research milestone “Blockchain Interoperability”, which will focus on interoperability of the Lisk ecosystem with other blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, Cosmos, Cardano, or Polkadot. This will result in a huge leap forward, as Lisk sidechains will then be able to communicate to blockchain applications in other ecosystems and vice versa. Blockchain interoperability is the next big evolutionary step for the Lisk ecosystem and will massively contribute to cooperations between a variety of projects located on different blockchain platforms. Finally, this is of key importance to advance the overall adoption of blockchain applications as a whole.

Conclusion

To summarize, we are delighted to finally present the new Lisk Mainnet v3 and all of its above-mentioned features and improvements that we have been working diligently on for the last 3 years. It has been a massive and complex task, which successfully resulted in the culmination and inclusion of all new features into one major and comprehensive migration of the Lisk Mainchain, to reduce the number of needed hardforks in the network. Now it is possible to take advantage of all the cool new features that you have been waiting for. 

However, rest assured this is just the beginning. The Lisk SDK can already be classed as a radiant gem, nevertheless, from now on it will be further improved and enhanced. With Lisk Interoperability coming, we are just one step away from having one of the most advanced and scalable interoperability solutions for blockchains that exist today.

Finally, we want to thank everyone who accompanied us during this exciting time of moving Lisk to the next level. Firstly, our dedicated Lisk community, which is always supportive and helpful and continues to motivate and inspire us to improve further. Without your support, this would not have been possible. It has been extremely motivating to see how community members have utilized the Lisk SDK to realize a variety of innovative project ideas, the building of websites with useful services for the community; and the continual engagement in the Lisk.chat, together with offering support to other community members. Finally, we also want to thank our community moderators and the community squad providing us with outstanding support and constructive feedback. We are eternally grateful to have such an active and supportive community, and are looking forward to continuing to provide support as the community expands and grows further.

Enjoy the new Lisk Mainnet everyone!