Announcing the Chorus One Loom Validator

Dear Loom community,

We are excited to announce the launch of the Chorus One Loom validator today!

What drives us at Chorus One is the mission to create a more efficient and open world, where people have control over their own actions and assets. Gaming has become a big industry over the last decade and it is growing at a rapid pace. Many games have become their own little closed-loop economies. Players can buy and earn in-game items and this is becoming the primary way to monetize games.

But the assets of gamers in games aren’t truly theirs. The game economies created tend to be closed. You can’t move assets out of a game into a different game. You’re at the mercy of a company that can seize assets at will. You can’t just sell them to anyone. Or have a community fund and own a game collectively.

Blockchain, in the end, is about enabling human collaboration on a massive scale. We believe that gaming could be the bleeding edge in exploring the future of collaboration and creation. But the issue with games is that there are a lot of actions with relatively small monetary value. The low throughput and high costs of blockchains so far have made that adoption by games a big obstacle.

Loom plans to change that. Loom is a platform built on top of Ethereum that allows building large-scale decentralized applications. And the first area of focus for Loom is to create the blockchain platform for gaming. A place where games can issue assets, assets can be traded, games can become interoperable with each other and the emerging internet of blockchains.

This is a vision we believe in and we are excited to support it going forward. But besides the compelling vision, what else attracted us to Loom?

Pragmatism

The Loom team is building cutting-edge technology, but they’re also pragmatic. They recognize that the goal is to bring blockchain capabilities to gaming, not to build fancy systems for their own sake. We think the tradeoffs the Loom team is making are solid.

Execution

It was only in January 2018 that Loom closed its funding round. Since then, they have made a massive amount of progress including launching CryptoZombies, a gamified course on Solidity that attracted an astonishing 370,000 signups.

Technology

Loom is using many technologies that we are interested in and bullish about. They are building one of the first Ethereum Plasma chains. They are using Tendermint as their consensus algorithm for the Plasma sidechain. They are planning to be one of the first blockchains to connect to the Cosmos Hub via IBC.

Now, you may ask yourself how we will be supporting the Loom Network. Here is what we will do:

Run a Validator

We will be running a Loom PlasmaChain validator. We are scheduled to go live within the next two weeks and you will be able to delegate your LOOM to our validator in the very near future when the Loom Delegation UI is launched. Any LOOM holder will be able to earn tokens by delegating to our validator.

Participate in Governance

We will be participating in Loom’s governance and help steer the project to long-term success.

Support the Network

We will help the Loom team with making sure the network is stable, issues are ironed out and contribute tools for building a robust validator ecosystem.

Educate Users

We will publish regular updates about Loom to keep people informed about the project. These will include monthly video updates, but we also have an in-depth Loom Investment Thesis, which we will publish in the coming week.

Before we wrap up, a few words about Chorus One:

The company was co-founded by myself and Meher Roy. We have both been working in the blockchain space for many years. You may have heard us as co-hosts on Epicenter, which is one of the longest running and most popular blockchain podcasts. My involvement with Tendermint also goes long back. In 2015, I worked for Monax (then Eris Industries), which was the first user of Tendermint. In 2017, I became COO of the Tendermint team and helped run the Cosmos fundraiser and scale the organization. And just about a year ago, we decided to build a company to operate infrastructure for Proof-of-Stake networks.

Since then, we’ve assembled an outstanding team, which includes expertise in distributed systems, DevOps and information security, scaling tech companies and economic research. We are one of the leading Cosmos validators and will be launching staking services on many networks in the future.

We’d love to work with you make Loom reach the moon. Sign up for our email list and we’ll keep you up-to-date when we publish new content and when delegation on Loom goes live. You can also check out our blog for a lot of staking related content, follow us on Twitter, or join our dedicated community channels on Slack and Telegram. We would love it if you stop by and introduce yourself!

Brian Crain and the Chorus One Team

Photo from Unsplash by Matteo Vistocco.
Originally published at blog.chorus.one on February 11, 2019.