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1 Year Anniversary of Lisk Builders Program

This month, we are proud to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Lisk Builders program.

In this blog post, we take a look back at this past year, share some statistics and cover all of the proof of concept blockchain applications.

The Lisk Builders program provided a financial incentive for developers to build proof of concept blockchain applications using the Lisk SDK.

By Lisk

26 Nov 2020

1 year Lisk Builders Program

This month, we are proud to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Lisk Builders program. In this blog post, we take a look back at this past year, share some statistics, and cover all of the proof of concept blockchain applications. The Lisk Builders program provided a financial incentive for developers to build proof of concept blockchain applications using the Lisk SDK.

As part of the Lisk Builders program, we decided to accept and process 2 potential applications per month. Once verified by us, each participant was given a timeframe of approximately 6 weeks to build their proof of concept blockchain applications, and upon successful completion, they were awarded a grant of 2,500 Swiss francs in LSK tokens.

The Lisk Builders program was originally launched in November 2019 at Lisk.js, a few months after the first alpha version of the Lisk SDK had been released. The overall goal of the program was to incentivize developers to dive into the technology and to develop a variety of different proof of concept blockchain applications that showcase what can be achieved by building their projects with the Lisk SDK. Besides the financial incentive, the Lisk Builders program provided developers with an excellent opportunity to promote their projects. This also entailed writing blog posts which were later published on the Lisk blog, together with various additional announcements on the Lisk official Twitter account, and other social media channels.

Having numerous proof of concept blockchain applications already available when the Lisk SDK enters the beta stage, together with the release of Lisk SDK 5.0.0, is especially valuable. This provides developers with further outstanding opportunities and inspiration to take another step forward, and build their own blockchain applications that have the ability to solve real-world problems.

The entire code of the blockchain applications developed for the Lisk Builders program is open source, which gives the opportunity to other developers to both explore and reuse it.

Overview of Participants

In the last year, there were 14 multi-national participants who took part in the Lisk Builders program. As can be seen on the map below we had entrants from all continents, however, the majority of them come from within Europe.

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A breakdown of which countries the participants come from can be seen below:

  • Netherlands: 5
  • France: 2
  • USA: 2
  • Argentina: 1
  • Belgium: 1
  • Indonesia: 1
  • Iran: 1
  • Romania: 1

As can be seen above, the majority of the participants reside in the Netherlands. It was very encouraging to notice that the program has already achieved a global reach, and with our future plans to be announced very soon, we are confident to build on the success of this program even further.

The following 12 participants have already completed the Lisk Builders program:

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The excellent work and efforts that the participants put into the Lisk Builders program projects have been very much appreciated. The proof of concepts blockchain applications developed often excelled our expectations. A few participants are still actively working to complete their projects, so some interesting new blog posts written by Lisk Builders participants are expected to be published in the upcoming weeks.

Our profound appreciation goes to the team at the Lisk Center Utrecht, particularly to Jurre who is part of the Moosty team. Not only did Moosty develop some outstanding proof of concepts as part of the Lisk Builders program, but they also put a lot of effort into constantly growing and educating the local Lisk community. As part of this initiative, the LCU community meetups moderated by Jurre have been a great addition to the Lisk Builders program. In the weekly meetups, community members, and especially previous Lisk Builders participants get the opportunity to present their projects to the community during an online presentation on Lisk.chat, which is also livestreamed on YouTube and uploaded later to the LCU youtube channel.

Overview of Blockchain Applications

So far 12 proof of concept blockchain applications have been developed as part of the Lisk Builders program, and 5 more are currently in the development process.

All blog posts presenting the completed projects can be found in the Lisk blog under the category ‘Apps’. The blog posts provide a detailed introduction to each project, and how the Lisk SDK has been utilized to build the blockchain applications. In addition, they also include links to all the relevant resources, such as the code repositories and live demos.

A summary of all projects built in the past year as part of the Lisk Builders program is listed below in chronological order:

November’19: Lisk.Bike

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The idea of this project was to build one tool that allows anyone to participate in a bike-sharing economy. In large cities within Europe (e.g. Berlin), numerous bike-sharing applications are available to choose from. In order to avoid installing multiple apps that are controlled by different organizations, Lisk.Bike aims to open up this industry to regular users. It is possible for anyone to add their own bike into this system, hence offering the possibility to ultimately reduce the number of bikes, which so often can be seen cluttering the densely urban areas. Therefore in the fullness of time, once this service gains traction and many bike owners have registered with Lisk.Bike, there should not be such a high requirement for many of the other additional bike rental services.

Basically, to use this system, a user has to deposit a fixed cost to the actual bike’s address. If the ride turns out to be shorter than planned, the difference between the actual riding cost and the deposit will be returned to the user’s wallet. Finally, once the user arrives at their destination the bike can then be locked, and is then available for the next user.

The work on the Lisk.Bike project was a collaboration between the following community members: Bartrw, mosbuma, sus4nne, Albert, Eric van Riet Paap, and Gimly.

December’19: Chronicler

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Chronicler is a proof of concept blockchain application designed to store, audit, or verify various types of content. Recently, decentralization has met the core of discussion with regard to information security. Maintaining archived data in a secure, permanent, and accessible manner has become a difficult task. A breakdown of the features provided by Chronicler can be seen below:

  • Creates searchable archives tied to an address.
  • Produces a time-stamped chain of custody for digital assets.
  • Audits of web content for censorship and edits.
  • Verification of your own content for transparency.

January’20: Moracle

There are some limitations on the functions that blockchain applications can accomplish. In order to provide further clarification, blockchain code does not have the ability to perform the following:

  • The generation of random numbers.
  • The possibility to access information from the web or use web APIs.
  • Communication with other blockchains.

In order to perform these functions, an outside entity (known as an oracle), must request/generate the data needed, and embed it in the blockchain for the application to gain access to it. However, existing oracle implementations are either centralized or expensive.

Moracle aims to solve these problems by offering an inexpensive, decentralized, and fast oracle service. Moracle offers the possibility to perform these functions by simplifying the process with their blockchain application.

February’20: FeatChain

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This era of our civilization has seen many sources of information coming to the forefront. Some of these sources are considered trustworthy, whereas many others are questionable. In today’s world it can be said that competitiveness has never been greater, resulting in many people being challenged with regard to proving their qualifications and experience amongst numerous other aspects in their lives.

When one achieves great accomplishments they may want to advertise those particular achievements or feats. On the other hand, unfortunately, someone who didn’t actually achieve something, may wish to deceive others by fraudulent or nefarious means. This can be as simple as writing a few sentences on a resume or updating a profile with incorrect facts on social media. It is a time-consuming process to verify that the information provided is correct, and this often takes a considerable amount of time before receiving the official feedback from the relevant authorities.

FeatChain proposes to be a verifiable single source of truth for people’s achievements.

March’20: Arcado Network

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The Arcado Network focuses on bringing a decentralized reward system to any multiplayer game by providing game developers with a generic API. This API is capable of performing many operations on the Lisk network through the Lisk SDK, such as game profile creation identified by a Lisk address, or a signal at the start of a game.

The goal of this generic API is to abstract the underlying Lisk logic. This means a game developer can solely focus on building their game. Hence, there is no need for the developer to have a deep understanding of the Lisk project.

The Arcado network was developed as a collaboration between Endro and Michiel Mulders.

March’20: Chip to chain

The project “Chip-to-chain” intends to securely connect physical objects and digital blockchains, by using an NFC microchip, sensors, and the Lisk SDK.

This project has been announced and is still under construction.

April’20: Decentralized Organization Chain

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One of the challenges of many new startups is acquiring the initial funding for their capital and operating expenses, such as rent, equipment, and salaries. Decentralized Organization Chain (DOC) allows companies to build their own blockchain and receive funding by selling tokens to investors. Investors, in turn, have a chance to make and influence company decisions by creating polls or running a forging node, creating a decentralized chain, and earning rewards. Anyone who has purchased enough tokens can become a board member and create polls. In addition, token holders can register themselves as investors so they're able to vote on polls. After the poll has ended, the company is expected to adhere to the results of the winning votes.

April’20: Recurring Payments

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Recurring Payments is a proof of concept which shows a relatively simple technical solution for building a deterministic contract between two parties by utilizing custom transactions. It enables the possibility to set up a contract with anyone who creates an account (wallet) in the system. The accounts, the contract, all of the changes in the contract; and finally all the activities are stored on the blockchain, which was specifically created for this proof of concept blockchain application.

May’20: Smart Inventory

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Smart Inventory is a blockchain application that tracks the history and life path of valuable items. Users can claim ownership of an item or transfer their items to another user. With each action certain metadata is supplied, and that in turn populates the dataset of an item. This enables users to analyze the history of each item.

May’20: Lisk DAO

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Six community members from the Lisk Center in Utrecht completed the Lisk DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) proof of concept, which includes a basic one member one vote (1m1v) voting mechanism. The ‘1m1v voting mechanism’ contains the basic components of a voting process as shown below:

  • Creating a DAO which includes an address book to register members.
  • Starting a voting.
  • Casting votes.
  • Visualizing progress.
  • Capturing results.

The community members, who participated in the DAO proof of concept blockchain application at the Lisk Center in Utrecht are: Jurre Machielsen, Raphael Cornelis, Sander Mandemaker, Marc Buma, Xinrong Ding, and Peter Nobels.

June’20: Lisk Crowd

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Lisk Crowd is a crowdfunding platform where backers (investors) have more control over their donations. The fundraiser can allow periods of voting in which backers can cancel the project. When a project starts a crowdfunding operation, they must indicate the amount of investment they need per period, and how many periods are needed to realize their project.

June’20: Fit Market

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Fit Market is an e-commerce project which is geared towards providing overall transparency relating to the food chain from an end-to-end perspective. The Fit Market project from Argentina aims to provide transparency to its end consumers, whereby it will be possible to ascertain the entire process and delivery chain from the food products inception to the end customer. This also includes a new information channel to its suppliers using a network and a mobile application.

July’20: Collabolancer

The Collabolancer application aims to provide a decentralized jobs marketplace that is geared towards both employers and freelancers/contractors. Once a particular project is posted and a budget is set, the freelancer can then bid to work on this particular project and simultaneously set a ‘collaboration fee’. This can be viewed by other potential freelancers who wish to also work on the project. Other freelancers can also submit a bid, or apply to join the first freelancer and pay the fee. After the work is completed the fee paid will then be distributed accordingly.

Ultimately, the goal is to incentivize collaboration between like minded freelancers, and further democratizes the process.

This project has been announced and is still under construction.

August’20: Stablecoin

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The Nash stablecoin is designed to maintain its price stability by using an algorithmic mechanism without the requirement for central control on supply and demand, as is the case with most famous stablecoins such as Tether, USDC, etc.

In addition to ordinary users who can buy Nash as a stable-value crypto-asset, arbitrageurs can earn money from the price fluctuations whilst helping maintain the peg. Furthermore, there is a decentralized reserve whereby investors can lock their crypto-assets and make a profit, (for example, using LSK). In the future, this reserve will be used to make the system sustainable under critical conditions.

August’20: Lisk Voice Messenger

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The Lisk Voice messenger functions by encrypting the message from the sender twice. Firstly, with the public key of the sender and secondly with the public key of the recipient. Both encryptions are added next to each other and are stored in a file that is uploaded to IPFS. Once the upload is performed, this will result in an IPFS hash. This respective hash is then stored on the chain and is public. The end result is a secure online messenger, whereby the security is built in from the core upwards.

September’20: Lisk Ride

"Lisk Ride" aims to create a community platform that connects drivers who have free seats in their vehicles with passengers looking to travel in the same direction. The blockchain application allows direct transactions between the participants and removes intermediaries.

This project has been announced and is still under construction.

September’20: Ticketing System

The aim of this proof of concept blockchain application is to create an honest ticketing system, including a ticket marketplace. It tracks the tickets for events on the blockchain in order to prevent fraudulent ticket resales.

This project has been announced and is still under construction.

October’20: Decentralized Hallar.io

"Decentralized Hallar.io" aims to decentralize hallar.io and to offer more opportunities for delegates to show their contributions to the community.

This project has been announced and is still under construction.

The Future of the Lisk Builders Program

After the first very inspiring year we have now decided to take a short break with the Lisk Builders program. The main reason for this is that we will soon be entering the beta stage of the Lisk SDK, which is marked by the release of the Lisk SDK 5.0.0. For this reason we plan to modify and further improve the Lisk Builders program in early 2021.

More details and updates about the Lisk Builders program, and when it will be open for applications again will be announced on our social media channels such as Twitter, etc.

Finally, we would like to thank all of the Lisk Builders for your great contributions coupled with your overall enthusiasm and dedication in the last year. We hope your proof of concept blockchain applications will develop further, and inspire new developers to realize their own project ideas at the same time.

Happy building.