Lisk, a decentralized applications and custom blockchain platform, today announced that it will be officially released on May 24, 2016.

Max Kordek, CEO of Lisk, made the announcement in a blog post. Initially, the release was planned around the end of this month or early May, however Kordek explained that something “unexpected” happened that pushed the release date further.

He said someone conducted a stress test on the network and it collapsed. CTO Oliver Beddows released a fix, setting the transaction maximum per block to 10. While this made the network stable again, it highlighted the need to optimise Lisk before launch. Kordek said that Beddows completely switched the Lisk blockchain database layer from SQLite to PostgreSQL, along with implementing many speed optimisations and restructuring big parts of the block synchronisation code.

“The results are fantastic; the client is much faster and more responsive. All concurrency problem we had, when many users were using the same node (e.g. login.lisk.io) are resolved”, Kordek said. “Additionally, the network backbone is far more robust and scalable. The update will be available next week in order to properly test it, a testnet reset is necessary”.

He added that by choosing May 24 launch, the team will have enough time to properly test the new release, finish the pre-launch development plan and work on the GitHub issues.

In March, Lisk announced that it raised over $5.7 million (14,000 BTC), which placed its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) as the second most successful crypto-currency crowd-fund to date. The startup commenced ICO on the 22nd of February 2016, which ended on 21st March, 2016.

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.