Mat Piaggi, community manager at Lisk (lisk.io), delivers a detailed overview of his company's open-source project work in the ever-expanding blockchain space. In Piaggi's work with Lisk, he seeks to build strong connections and bridges between brands, consumers, and communities. He has a broad range of experience with emerging startups in Germany, New Zealand, and Australia, and as community manager, he strives to bring parties together to form a global community-based movement built upon Lisk's methods and tech advances. Piaggi's interest in cryptocurrency in regard to market trading increased his desire to learn how blockchain could benefit many types of industries. Piaggi earned his bachelors degree in communications from the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. 

The blockchain is a type of add-only transaction in regard to a collection of accounts. Specifically, this collection, or ledger, can only be written onto, or added onto, with new information, while previous information that is stored in blocks cannot be mutated, edited, or even adjusted. Blockchain utilizes cryptography to bring together contents of the new blocks with each currently existing block, such that a change to the contents of a block in the chain would nullify the data in all subsequent blocks.

Piaggi's company, Lisk, is comprised of 50 plus people who are technology experts from all over the globe. Lisk seeks to create scalable, customizable solutions for applications businesses and industry leaders can utilize. Piaggi discusses how his goal is to lower the barrier of entry for the technology, making it more accessible to everyone, and to facilitate the user experience, making it easier to use for anyone irrespective of how tech-savvy they may be. Piaggi discusses how their platform is easy to use for developers who already have a basic understanding of JavaScript, which is the widest used coding language in the world.

The blockchain expert provides an overview of Lisk's major technology products—Lisk Core, Lisk Elements, and Lisk Commander. As he explains, on the network side, List Core is essentially the "brain" of their products. Lisk Core is a tool for technical users who choose to access Lisk's primary network blockchain data, to secure network infrastructure or succeed in achieving delegate forging access. Lisk Elements is a collection of libraries that will allow developers to customize their own sidechain. And Lisk Commander allows developers to conduct their sidechain development and start up their projects. 

Additionally, Piaggi details the user-interface side of Lisk's development products such as Lisk Hub, which functions as a wallet and allows users to interact with a wider ecosystem. Piaggi explains that as Lisk is an open source project, there is greater transparency and trust, better community engagement, and higher security due to extensive testing. 

Piaggi discusses some of the future developments that will be on the horizon in the coming months and years, such as bringing Lisk Core over to the main net and lifting the entire sidechain development kit over the hump, adding features, as they move to and past their 1.0 iterations. And as the close of 2018 approaches, Lisk will be involved in many international conferences and community development meetings to expand their reach further.