You can tell something made it big in the tech world when you see people make money just by trying to emulate it.
This was the case with Bitcoin and now we can see it more and more with Ethereum as well. Lisk, a decentralized applications and custom Blockchain platform has recently completed its crowd-fund and raised 14,000 bitcoin (about $6 million).
Lisk positions its solution as an alternative to Ethereum, which offers greater simplicity and the use of the popular programming language JavaScript, so that developers will be able to create dapps more rapidly and easily. The decentralized startup was founded by CEO Max Kordek, and CTO Oliver Beddows, who first worked together at the MIT licensed decentralized application platform Crypti. They say that the Lisk team members are "huge fans of Ethereum and are fully prepared to take it on."
The launch of the platform is estimated to be on the 11th April. The Lisk team is already working with Microsoft to bring it to the Azure cloud. As a first step Microsoft has officially integrated Lisk into its Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) program – meaning developers worldwide can develop, test, and deploy Lisk decentralized applications using Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform and infrastructure.
Additionally, Lisk is in a strategic partnership with the research lab Chain of Things which investigates whether blockchain technology can be effective in establishing security in the Internet of Things. The aim is for the CoT Research Lab to test the feasibility of blockchain based Internet of Things applications on a global scale.