Thanks @wasabbi for your honest and critical feedback here. I try to respond to your points below:
I have to be very honest here - the way this 100M LSK proposal is being justified feels unconvincing, clumsy, and deeply discouraging for long-time community members.
Lisk is much older than Optimism. By now, it should be far bigger, not still struggling to justify its existence while younger projects have raced far ahead. Comparing Lisk to Optimism isn’t reassuring - it just highlights how little progress Lisk has made despite having a huge head start, far more time, and significant resources.
To be frank here, I think Lisk made the wrong technical bets in the past. Focusing on JavaScript and scaling via a network of L1 blockchains has turned out to be a path that the market did not adopt (as we shared when we transitioned to a L2). In an emerging and very dynamic new technology field these things happen all the time. Typically the majority of projects and technical solutions will not be successful long-term. In contrast to many other projects that have simply disappeared, Lisk still exists due to the commitment of the founders and long-term, conservative treasury management. We have also honestly acknowledged these shortcomings and switched to what we believe is the best technical solution and future of blockchain technology - Ethereum rollups. In contrast to that, other blockchain projects continue to hype their technology and token although it is not competitive and not being used. Still, I understand your frustration when comparing progress and token price to other projects that are much younger but managed to make better technical choices and achieve traction faster.
Here is also Max’s perspective on the history of Lisk.
Meanwhile, Max Kordek, once the face of the project, has largely disappeared from view. The DAO, which was presented as a new chapter of community-driven growth, has so far delivered almost nothing but failures. Even when the community expressed a clear will to burn tokens, the DAO itself stopped it - showing that “decentralization” here is more of a slogan than a reality.
It is true that Max and Oliver do not have an operational role in the Lisk team any more. Instead, the Lisk team is led by Dominic, Shu and myself as well as several other excellent colleagues as will soon be shown on a new team page on our website. Still, Max and Oliver are active in the Lisk DAO, very much aware of what is happening with Lisk and provide regular feedback and advice. Note that this change has been already in effect since the end of 2023 and was also communicated last year.
Regarding the 100M LSK burn vote and the decentralization of the Lisk DAO, I agree that we need to put more efforts making the Lisk DAO more decentralized. For more details, I refer to this longer detailed statement in the forum after the vote.
On top of that, the token price has collapsed, investor confidence has been destroyed, and instead of building sustainably with the already enormous treasury, the solution is always the same: mint more tokens. That doesn’t look like strategy, it looks like helplessness and avoidance of accountability. To many, it even makes the project appear like a slow-motion scam - where money simply disappears, the token value keeps bleeding, and the project slides down the market cap rankings year after year. The treasury itself has been shrinking dramatically over the years - once holding meaningful real assets, now worth only a fraction of that - another sign of decline rather than growth.
I fully understand the frustration around the price development of LSK. However, the minting of new tokens and reasoning for it was transparently communicated before the token migration giving token holders time to evaluate whether to continue holding LSK with the new allocation and token economics. As explained in the original post above, only a part of the Onchain Foundation treasury is available to Lisk which is also the reason that new tokens were minted for supporting the growth of the Lisk ecosystem. Considering the competitive space we are in, I think it is unrealistic to expect Lisk to be successful without significantly investing into growth, in particular, into founders building on Lisk.
Worse, there are no real ideas on how Lisk can be competitive anymore. It’s just another Ethereum Layer 2 now - something dozens of teams can spin up in days. There’s nothing unique, nothing visionary, nothing that explains why Lisk should stand out in an already overcrowded space. Today, the project has one of the worst reputations in the entire crypto space and, frankly, less potential than many random memecoins.
If the Lisk team truly wants support, then face these realities head-on: explain why after all these years the project is still lagging behind, why leadership has disappeared, why the DAO isn’t delivering, and why the community’s voice has been ignored. Without that, asking for another 100M tokens feels less like ambition and more like taking investors for granted.
Yes, we made the conscious choice to be “just another Ethereum L2” because we realized that it is better to pivot to the best technology available instead of continuing to build something different with 20+ engineers that may be unique, but is not what builders are asking for. We have been talking a lot with builders. Most of them prefer an EVM-equivalent chain so they can use the largest collection of tools, libraries and audited smart contracts. They also prefer to plug into Ethereum as the largest hub for stablecoins and onchain liquidity. As we are using existing technology (OP Stack), we substantially reduced our team size and operations cost. Instead, we are now following a founder-focused approach spending most efforts on what actually makes a difference for builders. I agree that the current website may not explain well enough why someone should build on Lisk, but an updated version is work-in-progress that should do a better job at doing that.
And just to add one more point:
https://x.com/LiskHQ/status/1960330467296809109
Are you really proud of this? Flying halfway across the world, spending investor money on a trip to Kilifi - one of the poorest Kenya cities in an already poor region - to “teach kids about blockchain.” From the outside, this doesn’t look like strategy, it looks like wasting money. It’s hard not to see it as little more than funding a holiday for the team with some parties, safaris, and photo-ops dressed up as ecosystem growth.
If the project is genuinely struggling for competitiveness and resources, how can this kind of spending possibly be justified? It feels more like YOLO tourism than a serious attempt to make Lisk relevant in the global crypto market.
To be clear here, the X post is a bit misleading and there are just a few team members (not the whole Lisk team) going to a press trip in Kenya. The participants are mainly journalists or KOLs, many of them local, as well as many local builders we work with. The main purpose is to show to journalists and KOLs what Lisk is doing on the ground as well as give our builders the opportunity to connect. As part of this trip, most participants are also attending ETHSafari, one of the largest African Web3 events sponsored by Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, Lisk and many others. ETHSafari also includes the trip to Kilifi that you mention. This is therefore far from tourism, but are important BD efforts in one of our key target markets.