Below, we would like to give a complete recap of how the Lightcurve team was involved in the Blockchain Week Berlin and the value it brought. For your convenience, we’ve divided our planner into three categories: hosted, speaker, and attended events.

Hosted events

Online webinar showcasing a tutorial in how to code your own transaction with the Lisk SDK

On August 9th, we hosted the first Lisk SDK Webinar presenting the first version of our blockchain application building toolkit. Rachel, our Tech Evangelist, gave an introduction to the Lisk SDK and its functionalities, followed by a tutorial on how to bootstrap a local blockchain.

Rachel then showcased how to create a custom transaction by using the example of a Cashback transaction. The end of the tutorial included a short Q&A session with Nazar. Several questions regarding multiple custom transactions were answered. If you did not make it in time for this webinar, a recording is available on our YouTube.

Online webinar showcasing Lisk Bills, our first PoC application using the Lisk SDK

On August 21st, another Lisk Webinar took place. Rachel, our Tech Evangelist, and members of our development team introduced Lisk Bills, a proof-of-concept invoicing app that allows users to create and pay for an invoice through two new custom transactions.

The webinar included an introduction of our first proof-of-concept application, a live technical demo showcasing its user interface and the blockchain infrastructure underneath. The last part of the webinar consisted of a small Q&A session mainly covering the difference between custom transactions and smart contracts.

Rachel also mentioned several other applications that were part of the internal ideation process. If you did not make it in time for this webinar, you can watch it on our YouTube channel.

Valuable feedback on Lisk Hub and Mobile during the Usability Testing event

As part of our Usability Testing Fortnightly Usability Sessions, we recently started a collaboration with Usability Testessen group in Berlin in order to test our user-facing products.

With their support, we hosted their monthly event on August 21st at our offices in the Atrium Tower. Lisk participated with three stations for Hub and Mobile which were tested by six participants each. Several issues were discovered during the usability testing which have been assigned to our development teams to fix. However, we are already seeing big improvements in the issues spotted during (and fixed after) the last testing event.

Lisk Workshop — a Deep Understanding of the Lisk SDK

Our last hosted event as part of the Blockchain Week was the Lisk SDK Workshopon August 28th. The workshop consisted of two sections; the Lisk SDK overview and the coding challenge using the Lisk Alpha SDK.

Rachel started her presentation with a quick introduction to Lisk with the scope of onboarding the new developers. Once the general project introduction was done, we showcased some of the SDK’s capabilities, followed by a walk through the Cashback Custom Transaction example. Developers also got a deep dive into the demo of Lisk Bills, an internal Proof of Concept application using the Lisk Alpha SDK. The attendees showed a real interest in the potential of Lisk SDK by actively participating in the workshop using the Cashback Example.

Almost all developers completed the tutorial, while three of them also managed to answer the feedback form for the Alpha SDK. Based on the feedback received from developers, the experience with Lisk SDK and Cashback tutorial was rated with 4.3 out of 5. All three developers involved in the feedback process plan to build a proof of concept with the Alpha SDK.

These three developers were awarded each with one double ticket for the Codemotion Conference in November and some Lisk branded swag. Besides trying out the Lisk SDK, the attendees had the chance to meet our development team and ask any questions they had about the topic. We plan on running these workshops more often in the upcoming months, so make sure to stay up to date on the Lisk Events page.

Here are some of the main takeaways from our SDK events

Lisk Webinars:

• Average number of views per webinar: 944
• Average number of unique views per webinar: 687

Lisk Workshop:

• Experience working with Lisk SDK: 4.3 out of 5
• 8.7 out of 10 want to continue using the SDK
• 100% of participants want to build a Proof of Concept with the Alpha SDK

Speaker events

Ali and Julian discussed Lisk Design Thinking at a UI/UX Designers Meetup

On August 20th, Julian, Head of Design, and Ali, Head of User Interfaces, presented during the UI/UX Designers meetup some of the challenges of designing for blockchain.

The main aim of their presentation was to showcase the outcomes of the Design Thinking process and share their experiences. Julian opened the talk with an introduction to the blockchain technology and its complexity. Ali presented five of the design specific challenges the team faced. For each challenge, the attendees got a technical explanation from Ali and also a design perspective from Julian. A comparison with other wallets was made in order to showcase the solutions Lisk’s team found to the mentioned challenges.

At the end of the presentation, Julian finished off by mentioning the high amount of challenges due to the complexity of the technology as well as the user-centered approach taken by Lisk. The attendees had the chance to ask design specific questions. Ali and Julian mentioned in the Q&A session about the Usability Testing plans for the upcoming months and the responsibilities within the Lisk Design team.

Rachel introduced the Lisk SDK and Lisk Bills demo to developers at a Coding Berlin meetup

Coding Berlin Meetup on August 27th was a great opportunity for Lisk to present the Lisk SDK to a packed room of developers. Rachel shortly introduced the Alpha SDK and showcased how to bootstrap your own blockchain and defining custom transactions. After a deep dive into the code, Rachel presented a demo of Lisk Bills.

The Q&A session included questions related to interoperability, custom transactions and use cases for Lisk. It was great to connect with the local developer community and get the attendees excited to attend the Lisk Alpha SDK workshop next day on August 28th. If you did not make for this meetup, a recording is available on Coding Berlin’s YouTube channel.

Jan discussed consensus algorithms and incentives at Humboldt University

On August 29th, the last day of the Blockchain Week, Blockchain Nights series organised an event at Weizenbaum Institute, which is part of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Their monthly meetups are often very technical because of the chosen topics and the speakers with scientific background.

The topic for this special edition meetup was Security of Smart Contracts, which attracted numerous students and researchers. Jan Hackfeld, Head of Research at Lisk, presented a comparison of consensus algorithms covering both Cosmos/Tendermint and Lisk BFT. The second half of his presentation consisted of ways to incentivize an honest consensus participation.

After three very in-depth presentations about measuring Ethereum-based ERC20 Token Networks and eclipsing Ethereum with false friends, a panel discussion about privacy and security matters took place. You can read Jan’s blog on the benefits of this consensus for Lisk.

You can then check out Nazar’s blog post exploring implementation of block finality (It’s also available on Hacker Noon)

Attended events

Blockchance Conference took place in Hamburg on August 16–17th. The event’s key topics were the future of economics and the future of society. Lothar, Head of Operations, Matthias, Head of Business Development, and Frederic, Legal Counsel, represented Lisk during this conference.

Besides networking with key players from the German blockchain scene, Lisk’s team also attended several interesting talks by Albert Peci, blockchain developer at Blockchance, Dr. Maupin, Director of Social Impact at IOTA, Christian Wolters, Business Unit Manager, Alexander Panasuk, CTO at spot9 payment. During this conference, interesting topics were covered such as the key domains to apply blockchain technology, potential use cases, mass adoption through simple interface, education as groundwork in innovation.

Lisk’s Research team attended the Web3Summit on August 19–21st at Funkhaus Berlin. Web3 Summit was the first large conference hosted during the Blockchain Week Berlin and gathered attendees from Germany, and abroad.

Lisk’s team attended the talks of Skale, LazyLedger, NYM, NEAR, Praxxis, and many others. Main topics discussed were related to decentralized applications and elastic sidechains, blockchain as data availability layers, share blockchain protocols, security audits, privacy.

On August 23rd, Rachel attended the DappCon event at the Technical University in Berlin. DappCon was the second large blockchain conference happening during Blockchain Week Berlin. This event was mainly centered around projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. Speakers included Vitalik, Joseph Lubin, Ameen Soleimani amongst others.

The themes discussed were DeFi, governance, and usually, meme driven development. Rachel’s favorite speaker was Shiv Malik, who drew on his experience as an investigative journalist and gave a powerful defense of Nick Szabo’s “Code is Law” theory.

With this, we are wrapping up the Blockchain Week Berlin. This was a great opportunity for Lisk to meet local industry players and to help build a strong blockchain community in Berlin. If you want to stay up-to-date with Lisk’s upcoming events, make sure to check our events page.