Jon’s Lisk Update — February 2020

Here is my update for the month of February 2020.

LDEM (Lisk Decentralized Exchange Manager)

In my last update, I mentioned LDEM very briefly. The goal of this project was to create an engine optimized for running lisk-dex nodes. Without LDEM, it was only possible to run a DEX as a custom module of lisk-core; this was somewhat tricky to do and had some negative performance implications when supporting multiple DEX markets on a single node. It was highly desirable to have each participating blockchain and market run in a separate process to make the most of modern multi-core CPUs.

LDEM is now stable enough that we decided to start using it as the main engine for the Leasehold sidechain which is currently running on testnet and which we are planning to launch to mainnet soon. See Leasehold core repo here: https://github.com/leasehold/leasehold-core

Aside from allowing each module to run in a separate process to provide vertical scalability, the most important feature which was introduced to LDEM this past month was the ability to have multiple distinct processes reuse the same module logic with different configurations. This allows us to use a single module as a template for different blockchains or DEX markets. This module templating feature is essential in allowing us to reuse the lisk-dex module to easily provide trading for multiple markets (each with different characteristics). Also, this feature allows us to easily launch new sidechains whose tokens can be immediately traded on the DEX. This could be useful for launching various kinds of Lisk-based security and/or commodity tokens without slowing down the Lisk mainchain. I hope to write more about these features in detail at some point in the future.

Lisk DEX

Here is the list of key improvements which were made over the past month:

• Optimized lisk-dex to run as a module of LDEM engine.
• Allowed thelisk-dex module to be used as a template for running multiple different DEX markets in parallel processes on a single LDEM node (each market can have its own distinct configuration).
• Allow DEX to support trading on more different kinds of sidechains (not just those built with Lisk SDK) through the use of custom blockchain module adapters.
• Improved the /status HTTP API endpoint to show more detailed information about a DEX market.
• Add support for re-using a single Lisk multisig wallet address for trading against multiple different sidechain tokens.
• Various efficiency improvements including batch propagation of signatures and multisig transactions.
• Use sha1 instead of md5 to reduce the probability of hash collisions when performing deterministic sorting of DEX orders within a block.
• Minor config file additions and changes.
• Completed several rounds of stress testing on testnet.

Leasehold

For the past few months, I’ve been involved in a sidechain project called Leasehold (LSH) as CTO. See website: https://leasehold.io/

In addition to using a blockchain to tokenize income from real estate, a key innovation of Leasehold is that the LSH token will be self-listed directly on the Lisk blockchain using our own community DEX. This means that it will be possible to directly buy a share of Leasehold’s recurring real estate income without any intermediaries.

Last month, we created a separate project repo for Leasehold called leasehold-core and this encapsulates all the functionality required for running a regular Leasehold node and also a DEX node in a vertically scalable way (uses LDEM). This node also runs an instance of the Lisk blockchain by default to help support the growth of the main Lisk network and to assist cross-chain DEX trading between Lisk and Leasehold in the future.

In addition to progress made on LDEM, lisk-dex, and leasehold-core, I’ve also been helping community members to launch delegate nodes on the Leasehold testnet and helped coordinate various projects in preparation for our upcoming mainnet release.

Special thanks

Thanks to GDT for the generous donation last month. Also, thanks to korben3 for the donation.

Thanks to everyone who voted for jong delegate over the past few months and got me into 101 forging position, especially Elite group for their support. This is a huge opportunity which comes with many responsibilities and I’m going to be investing 100% of my energy and donating 50% of forging rewards to contribute as much value back to Lisk as I can.

Please vote for jong

To keep jong in the top 101 and to encourage more of this kind of contribution to Lisk, please vote 10081147774228851351L