Lisk is a cryptocurrency and a platform for decentralized applications & sidechains written in JavaScript. It was officially launched on January 30th of this year and featured a 4 week long ICO during which the team raised an impressive $5.8 million.

The amount raised places Lisk in the top 20 highest funded crowdfunding projects worldwide, ranking second in the category for cryptocurrency projects, right behind Ethereum.

The Lisk network hasn’t officially launched yet so if you missed the ICO you cannot currently buy or sell Lisk, however, you can play around on the testnet and even get some testnet Lisk. The official launch is planned for April 11th of 2016, because of the popularity of the project many exchanges have signed up to trade the cryptocurrency upon launch or shortly after launch so you will be able to buy or sell Lisk then.

What makes the Lisk project different than other decentralized application platforms is the ease at which developers can start creating those apps. Unlike Lisk’s competitors, users looking to create their own dapps (decetralized applications) won’t have to read extensive documentation or learn a new programming language. Lisk dapps are written in Javascript, which is by far the easiest programming language to use and is by far the most popular as well.

Furthermore, each decentralized application will have it’s own blockchain, meaning that the main blockchain will not get bloated with micro transactions from dapps. That model allows for better scalability by dramatically reducing the blockchain size.

The vision the Lisk team shares is to be able to provide a developer friendly platform with a low barrier of entry, and allow for any type of dapp to be easily deployed:

Our Dapp Store and application platform will be in a state which allows the development of complex decentralized applications like sports betting, prediction markets, exchanges or social networks. Our continued efforts will now lie on getting developers to our platform who will develop awesome dapps.

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