UTRECHT — May 21, 2024 —Today, following the Lisk blockchain’s upgrade to the Optimism Superchain as an Ethereum Layer 2, Dutch startup Klayr Labs announced it would be taking over the Layer 1 technology and starting a new blockchain on June 25. The name of this blockchain will be “Klayr.”
Moving forward, Klayr Labs, which is based in the Netherlands and founded by a team of Lisk and web3 experts, will run operations and maintenance and ecosystem development for the Layer 1 platform.
About Klayr Labs, the Klayr Blockchain, and Lisk
Late last year, the Layer 1 blockchain Lisk announced that they intended to re-launch as an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain by joining the Optimism Superchain. With Lisk’s market cap notched at more than $170 million at the close of 2023, this marked one of the web3 ecosystem’s most significant pivots to Ethereum.
The leadership at the Onchain Foundation, keen to maintain the years of development invested in Lisk and to support the developer ecosystem seeking to remain on Lisk’s Layer 1, identified a leadership team from within the community that could bring the technology and the spirit of the Layer 1 forward.
They found this in the team of Colecti, who developed the Lisk blockchain’s first digital asset and NFT marketplace. Active within the web3 and blockchain sector since 2017, the four founders (Lukas Bronsvoort, Jurre Machielsen, Raphaël Cornelis and Sander Mandemaker) are veteran tech entrepreneurs with vast experience developing blockchain applications and companies. Aside from their work with Colecti, they founded the largest blockchain-focused coworking space in the Netherlands, the Lisk Center Utrecht, and the Lisk blockchain explorer Liskscan.
Together, the Colecti founders established a partnership with the Onchain Foundation to provide technical support and funding to Klayr Labs for at least two years, thereby ensuring the continued existence of the Layer 1 technology and support for its developers and dApp creators.
The Klayr Labs team is based in Utrecht and is rapidly scaling its team to bring even more developers to the highly customisable and easy-to-use Layer 1 blockchain. With a well-documented SDK and years of established performance, their aim is to provide digital ownership to a million people through the Klayr toolkit by 2030, thereby expanding the healthy ecosystem of web3 users.
Based on the technology of the Lisk Layer 1, a number of improvements are being made to the blockchain, including an upgrade to its Proof-of-Stake consensus.
The original Layer 1 platform was built to pioneer sidechain creation and interoperability, and this capability remains in Klayr. Most notably, the aim of Klayr in these changes was to make the mainchain even more usable to developers. By adopting the WebAssembly module, it will be possible to deploy smart contracts on the mainchain in a variety of languages besides the original Javascript. With the addition of other modules, developers will be able to create tokens and digital assets like NFTs and deploy new smart-contract-driven applications. The Klayr Labs team has also made a public commitment to opening a DAO to ensure community needs are well-represented in future scaling plans.
“We have been developing in this ecosystem for many years, so we are familiar with what makes this blockchain one of the best Layer 1s for transaction speed, flexibility, and security: its sidechain interoperability. At the same time, we know it will be even better for developers to have more choice in how they build on Klayr, and that includes having mainchain accessibility,” said Lukas Bronsvoort, co-founder and CEO of Klayr Labs.
“We believe that the futures of both Lisk and Klayr are bright. Even though Lisk will move to a future as a Layer 2, we are confident in the technology we created for our past Layer 1, and look forward to seeing how the Klayr team takes it forward. Reliable, secure, and usable technology is required at all levels, and Klayr has our full support in helping make their Layer 1 blockchain a resounding success,” said Max Kordek, President at Onchain Foundation.
Key Statistics
The Klayr blockchain is expected to have some of the lowest transaction costs in web3 ($0.00025) with a block time of just 7 seconds – making it an efficient and reliable chain on which to build. As it was founded from the community that helped develop Lisk’s Layer 1 blockchain, it has a pool of more than 300,000 web3 natives and builders from which to grow.
More information about the planned consensus mechanism and tokenomics changes can be read on the Klayr website here.