Meet the New Lisk Mainnet

We are proud to announce that on August, 21st 2021, at around 2:00 pm CEST, the Lisk Mainnet v2 successfully completed the migration to Lisk Mainnet v3. This comprises the biggest protocol change to ever occur on the Lisk blockchain, and marks the beginning of a whole new era for the Lisk network as it eliminates all weaknesses of the Lisk Mainnet v2 related to fees, consensus algorithm and accounts, and also prepares and improves the Lisk blockchain for the upcoming interoperability release in many regards.

What does this mean for me?

This section provides an overview of the new and updated features which are now available on the new Lisk Mainnet v3. 

  1. New Account System

Did you know that with Lisk v3 you have an extremely secure new account address system, with built-in error detection for typos? No need for account initialization anymore! We give our community complete security.

The old address and ID system has been replaced and all existing accounts have been automatically migrated to the new system. This introduces a longer address, decreasing user experiences of address collisions and ensuring that such addresses are resistant to preimage attacks. In addition, this also eliminates the need to initialize a new account, as was required in the old Mainnet v2, ensuring that every new account in the Lisk network is completely secure right from the start.

The following credentials of your account have not changed:

  • Your private key
  • Your public key
  • Your 12 word mnemonic passphrase

Hence, you can still use your old passphrase to log in to Lisk Desktop as before.

The following credentials of your account have changed:

  • Your Lisk address

The new address is created from the public key as described in the illustration shown below. Please note that we now append a checksum of the address at the end of the address, which provides support for detecting typos in the account addresses.


Thanks to the checksum depicted in the above illustration, a user can mistype up to 4 characters in the address, and it is guaranteed that the application will detect it. It does not matter if the errors are introduced in the checksum part, and/or the part that represents the 160-bits address.

All important information about the new address and ID system can be found in the blog post: The new Lisk ID System.

2. Dynamic Fee System

Did you know that with Lisk v3 transactions are up to 98,64% cheaper? Instead of 0.1 LSK the new minimum fee is now only 0.00136 LSK. We give our community competitive fees.

 

Our new dynamic fee system has replaced the static fees, making transactions significantly cheaper to execute. This also enables users to overwrite their transactions in the transaction pool (i.e. transactions which are not included in the block yet), by setting a higher fee and the same nonce as the transaction they wish to overwrite. The minimum fee of each transaction is always burned to secure the system against various game theoretic attack scenarios.

More information about dynamic fees can be found in the following blog posts: Lisk's Dynamic Fee System and Static vs Dynamic Fee System: A Comparison of Both.

3. Revamped DPoS Consensus Algorithm

Did you know that with Lisk v3 the DPoS consensus algorithm received an entire revamp? A fair network, new validators, and no more cartels. We give our community fair decentralization.

The DPoS consensus algorithm has been completely redesigned to improve the decentralization and security of the validator selection algorithm. This includes a completely new voting mechanism, two additional randomly selected delegates per forging round, and a new punishing mechanism for malicious delegates.

Please note that all previous votes for delegates have not been migrated to the new Lisk Mainnet v3, and every account needs to recast their votes for their favorite delegates.

More information can be found in the following blog post: Actions Required for the Upcoming Mainnet Migration.

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A list of the most important features in the DPoS new consensus algorithm can be viewed in the illustration below:


More information about the new DPoS can be found in the blog post: 3 New DPoS LIPs: Changing the Voting System for Lisk.

 

4. Total Immutability with Lisk BFT

Did you know that with Lisk v3 you can send a transaction and be certain it never gets reverted again? This is the way forward for future cross-blockchain transactions on our blockchain application platform. We give our community total immutability.

 

With sidechains and interoperability coming into the Lisk ecosystem in the next major release of Lisk Core v4, blockchain applications will be able to facilitate transactions across multiple blockchains. To achieve this, it is necessary to guarantee that a sent transaction can never be reverted again. That is precisely what our newly implemented Lisk BFT consensus algorithm is doing.

 

A block will become final on average after 155 blocks or approximately 26 minutes after it was included in the blockchain. If you want to be sure a block is finalized, compare its block height and the finalized height of the blockchain (e.g. check the finalized height with Lisk Desktop or the community-maintained explorers Lisk Observer and Lisk Scan). If the block height of the block is lower than the finalized height, it is 100% ensured that this block and all its contained transactions are final and cannot be reverted or changed again.

 

All important information about the new Lisk BFT consensus can be found in the following blog posts: Introducing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus for Lisk and Exploring Pre-Votes and Pre-Commits

5. Significant Performance Improvements

Did you know that with Lisk v3 over 1,000,000 transactions can be processed every day? That is a vast increase of 5 times more than with the previous version. We give our community greater scalability.

The performance of Lisk Core has been improved in multiple ways. The main improvements are listed below:

  • Smaller blockchain size: The blockchain data is now stored in a key-value store instead of a Postgres database. Therefore, the required blockchain size has diminished and is now around 10 times smaller.
  • Faster query response times: API query response time has improved significantly.
  • Faster block processing time: The time required to process a block has decreased by 3 times on average for empty blocks and over 33 times for blocks containing transactions.
  • Increased maximum transactions per second (TPS): Byte based blocks allow the inclusion of many more transactions in a block.


Further details about the performance improvements of Lisk Core v3 can be found in the blog post Benchmarking Lisk Core v3.0.0 against Lisk Core v2.1.6.

6. New Modular Architecture

Besides the extensive protocol improvements, there have also been large improvements in the code base of the Lisk SDK, which is also utilized in version 3 of Lisk Core.

The overall development experience has improved greatly by creating a completely modular architecture of the blockchain application, whereby all different components of the application can be changed, extended, or replaced by the developer. 

The Lisk Commander has become a powerful CLI tool, which greatly simplifies the creation of blockchain applications. For example, it is now possible to bootstrap a completely new blockchain application with one single command, or to generate skeletons for new modules, plugins, or assets for a blockchain application.


For more information about the new architecture, and how to develop blockchain applications with the Lisk SDK, check out the Lisk SDK documentation.


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