Lisk, the blockchain application platform, announced today plans to issue block rewards to Lisk delegates – a critical milestone that will be reached before the end of 2016.

The company said that the development of the Lisk protocol has sufficiently advanced and stabilized, allowing for forging rewards to be awarded to delegates for the first time. For every block forged, a process similar to Bitcoin mining, every elected delegate will be awarded 5 LSK. Currently valued at over $22 million, LSK, the cryptocurrency underpinning the platform, sits in 14th place of the most valuable digital currencies.

“We’re excited to share great news with our community. Upon reaching block 1451520, the platform will automatically initiate the issuance of block rewards, whereby 5 LSK will be sent directly to each elected delegate for every block they forge. We can now announce that this block will be reached before the end of 2016,” said Max Kordek, CEO and Co-Founder of Lisk.

Lisk utilizes a Delegated Proof of Stake consensus algorithm which requires 101 elected delegates to protect the mainchain. These delegates are remunerated for their service to the network with forging rewards, along with transaction fees.

In preparation for the roll out of the rewards, Lisk released version 0.5.0 to the testnet with improved stabilization, according to the official announcement. The development team focused on increasing block propagation efficiency and reliability by adding a new "Broadhash" implementation. 

In addition, the team rewrote the peer to peer transport layer, massively reducing CPU usage under high loads; expanded test coverage with further refactoring of legacy code; strengthened schema validations for better data integrity; and implemented various mitigations against multiple edge-case fork occurrences, the company said.

Lisk will now begin the development of Lisk 0.6.0 to be completed over the coming month. The forthcoming version brings a complete rewrite of all database logic, allowing for faster block processing and atomicity. It will also add further intelligence to the unconfirmed transaction memory pool, which is designed to open the way for larger block sizes.

“Looking ahead into early 2017, we expect to have made drastic progression on stabilization of the Lisk sidechains and the development of the App SDK – a unique feature to our blockchain application platform. We look forward to sharing much more progress with the community in the coming weeks,” added Kordek.

Founded in early 2016, Lisk completed an Initial Coin Offering in May and attracted approximately 14,000 BTC, now worth approximately $10 million USD. At the time, Lisk’s ICO became the second most successful cryptocurrency crowdfund to date, and it remains among the top 25 largest crowdfunds in history.