Lisk, the decentralized application and custom blockchain platform, has announced that it has successfully concluded its crowd-fund and raised over $5.7 million (14,000 BTC). The startup commenced Initial Coin Offering (ICO) on the 22nd of February 2016, which ended on 21st March, 2016.

“During the ICO, we collected approximately 14,009 BTC and 80,742,575 XCR. This has placed the Lisk ICO as the second most successful crypto-currency crowd-fund, and one of the top 20 crowd-funds world-wide. This in itself is already a huge achievement for Lisk”, CEO Max Kordek and CTO Olivier Beddows said via blog post on Medium.

Lisk functions as an alternative to other decentralized application platforms. The simplicity of its platform and use of JavaScript will enable programmers to develop their own dapps rapidly and easily. The platform is expected to launch on 11th April.

“Our current plan is to launch Lisk on the 11th April, 2016. This is an estimate based on current workloads, so may change over the next 3 weeks”, the blog post added.

Lisk has been working with Microsoft to bring the Lisk decentralized application platform to the Azure cloud. Microsoft Azure has officially integrated Lisk into its Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) program, enabling developers across the world to develop, test, and deploy Lisk decentralized applications using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and infrastructure.

In addition, Lisk joined forces with Chain of Things (CoT) to investigate merging points for blockchain technology and the Internet of Things. The CoT Research Lab will assess whether blockchain technology can be effective in establishing security using IoT. It will seek to test the feasibility of blockchain based Internet of Things applications on a global scale.

Lisk said that is actively looking for developers who can develop JavaScript based decentralized applications with the Lisk SDK.