2016: The Year of the Alt – Lisk Review

Lisk (LSK) raised a successful ICO that ended on the 21st March of this year, raising about US$6m. It aims to compete with Ethereum (ETH) as a cryptocurrency and a platform for decentralised applications (DApps) & sidechains. Its competitiveness lies in its ease at which developers can create these DApps, as the coding language behind it is JavaScript. JavaScript fans know their pet language isn’t the best for the job, but easy development and plentiful tooling may win the day. ETH, for contrast, writes its DApps in Solidity, a fit-for-purpose yet unproven language.

Furthermore LSK differentiates itself as it takes advantage of sidechains for use of these DApps, so as to extend the scalability of the ecosystem without impacting the speed or performance of the core blockchain. It’s co-founder and CEO, Max Kordek, has stated “We can support thousands and thousands of decentralized applications because every decentralized application runs in its own sidechain. With the sidechains, our mainchain stays extremely lean and efficient because it doesn’t get polluted with all the dapp data.”

Last week LSK listed on Poloniex with an extraordinary day in terms of volume and price action. Its ICO price was 0.00018265 LSK/XBT and immediately listed at 0.00275 LSK/XBT on Poloniex (1400% return), the price dumped to a low of 0.00035 and is now trading around 0.00070. Trading volumes surpassed ETH, the most liquid altcoin right now, showing that LSK is a serious contender in the cryptocurrency space.

It is interesting to note that even over the extreme run up in XBT/USD over the weekend, LSK/XBT has held its ground. To give you some numbers, the performance of LSK/XBT since ICO is approx 283% whilst the performance of LSK/USD is 400%.

BitMEX recently launched a perpetual LSKXBT swap with a 3.33x leverage, the first margin product on LSK to date. No where else are you able to short LSK. Whether you feel LSK will knock out ETH or it will end up like Bitcoin’s baby brother Litecoin, BitMEX offers you the opportunity to express your views with leverage. For more trading details, please see our blog post. Happy Trading!