Soon after we announced the scheduled release date and pre-launch development plan, someone stress tested our network and it collapsed. A few hours later Oliver released a fix which sets the transaction maximum per block to 10. It fixed the stress test related problems and made the network stable again, however it became crystal clear that we need to optimize Lisk before launch. The code was not durable enough yet to withstand the enormous popularity of Lisk. Therefore, Oliver completely switched the Lisk blockchain database layer from SQLite to PostgreSQL. Additionally, he implemented many speed optimizations and restructured big parts of the block synchronization code.

The results are fantastic; the client is much faster and more responsive. All concurrency problem we had, when many users were using the same node (e.g. login.lisk.io) are resolved. Additionally, the network backbone is far more robust and scalable. The update will be available next week in order to properly test it, a testnet reset is necessary.

Unfortunately, the database switch pushed us back for 9 days and further tests of the changes will require a total of one week. On GitHub we also received more issues in the past weeks which need to be fixed before launch.

Therefore, coming back to the release date. In order to have a successful launch Lisk needs to “simply work”. We decided for quite a generous release date. Which gives us more than enough time to properly test the new release, finish the pre-launch development plan, and work on the GitHub issues.

The Lisk release will be on May the 24th, 2016.

To make the wait for our community more comfortable, we will be much more open from now on. That means, we

• show you our internal roadmap until release date.
• start our bi-weekly community meetings.
• publish weekly summarises of what we achieved in the past week.
• push out more regular blog posts.

However, the long wait is not for nothing. You will be blessed with a faster, more secure, more robust, and more feature-rich Lisk. Now, we can reflect on our transparency and work on our openness. It also gives us enough time to prepare important documents, more guides and handbooks, new bounties, and to get more exchanges list Lisk at launch day.

Thank you very much for your patience.