Lisk, the open-source blockchain application platform, has expanded into multiple new global markets in its first six weeks since launch, according to CEO and co-founder Max Kordek.  

Lisk launched officially in May this year, following its successful Initial Coin Offering (ICO). It released its first public blockchain, v0.3.0 in late May 2016. Lisk trades as LSK, and has been a top 10 coin in market cap in the world since its trading debut on CoinMarketCap, Crypto-Currency Chart and CoinCap.io.

After initially launching on powerhouse exchanges Bittrex and Poloniex, Lisk now trades on 18 exchanges, including new regional additions in China (Yunbao.com, Jubi.com, BitBays.com and Touzibi.com), Russia (Livecoin.net), Poland (BitBay.net), and ChameleonBit (Brazil).  Poloniex also lists a LSK/ETH pairing, which is new to the exchange as previous pairings were for BTC and USDT.

Lisk CEO Max Kordek has been recruiting developers and evangelists globally, including major presentations in China, Russia and Ukraine.  These have in many cases been accompanied by rapid adoption and an uptick in trading in these regions.

“We recognize at Lisk that blockchain applications are automatically global,” said Kordek. “Therefore, we made the rapid globalization of our developer community and exchanges an immediate priority.  We are pleased that the Lisk message of scalable blockchain applications using sidechains and the ability to port over existing programs written in JavaScript has been so well received.”

The Lisk vision is to have a highly scalable public blockchain where decentralized applications can be programmed without learning the often complex languages of individual blockchains.  In this case, Lisk chose JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language (more popular than C/C++ or Java), as it has a huge, global base of developers that can adapt existing applications or create new ones by utilizing Lisk’s easy-to-use SDK and extensive documentation for rapid development of decentralized applications (dapps) and custom blockchains.

In order to turn this vision into reality, Lisk held a four-week crowdsale which ended on March 21, 2016, raising more than 14,000 bitcoins and 80 million crypti (80 percent of the existing market).  The price of those assets on the final day of the sale was $5.75 million, but an increase in bitcoin valuation since then has made its crowdsale proceeds currently worth $9.1 million.

Kordek and his CTO/co-founder Oliver Beddows have been actively involved in cryptocurrency development for quite some time.  Kordek became very involved in cryptocurrency, initially in the Litecoin community, then as CEO of the Nxt Organization (Nxt has been a top 20 coin since its inception), and finally as an active member of the Crypti cryptocurrency team. Beddows has been a full-stack software developer for more than 15 years and developed tools on Crypti prior to teaming up with Kordek to create Lisk.  Beddows is responsible for all core development of the Lisk platform and managing community contributions to the code.