Lisk, a decentralized applications and sidechain platform, has announced a partnership with crypto-currency exchange platform ShapeShift.io, which will deliver the necessary technology to participate with the biggest crypto-currencies in the Lisk Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

The ICO will run from 22nd of February 2016 till 21st of March 2016 and 85,000,000 LISK will be distributed in partnership with ShapeShift during this time. Accepted crypto-currencies during the ICO are Bitcoin (BTC), Crypti (XCR), Ethereum (ETH), and any accepted by ShapeShift.

“We are happy to announce a partnership with ShapeShift which will allow us to accept all of their supported crypto-currencies e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Doge, Monero, and more”, CEO Max Kordek and CTO Olivier Beddows announced via blog post on Medium.

Lisk is set to launch towards the end of March. The startup aims to enable rapid development of decentralized applications and custom blockchains, while keeping all projects and services managed by the Lisk team completely open source.

Founded by Kordek, former NXT Organization CEO, and Beddows who has 15 years experience in developing web based e-commerce applications, Lisk claims to offer an easier alternative to Ethereum. The platform uses JavaScript and will allow developers to build, publish, distribute and monetize their applications within the custom built crypto-currency powered system.

In an interview with Forklog, Kordek explains, “Lisk is built on top of the source code Crypti. We use the remaining unreleased version Crypti v0.5.5, which, when you start the client does not load blockchain”.

It recently added its first decentralized application to the Lisk Dapp Store: The Lisk Guestbook, which allows a user to submit an arbitrary comment of up to 1000 characters onto a custom sidechain.

Within the next few months, the Lisk team plans to introduce a multi-language user interface, a fully responsive design for mobile and tablet devices, implement IPFS as a dapp hosting method, and will drastically improve their own Dapp Store.