Loopring Monthly Update — 2020/02
We apologize that this month’s report is a few days late. It’s just been a hectic end of month — in the best way possible! We hope you enjoy these updates.
R&D
Loopring Protocol
We’ve spent some time optimizing our ZKP prover with great results: the prover cost was reduced by 15x, significantly reducing our offchain costs per trade to just $0.000042 per trade, or $42 per 1,000,000 trades. We published a detailed article about these optimizations. [Recommended read for the technical folks and ZKP enthusiasts out there].
With these prover optimizations, the all-in cost to a settle a trade is now $0.000124, or just over one one-hundredth of a cent!
We plan to deploy the new prover into production within two months. The results of this optimization are a great encouragement to us. Before this, we always thought that generating zero-knowledge proofs would impose considerable cost pressure on our operation. After this optimization, it likely will not be the case anymore.
We will soon begin to optimize the code and process of another Trusted Setup to increase the protocol’s capacity in the middle of the year. We intend to support at least 64 million users per exchange in a minor upgrade — the protocol currently supports ‘only’ 1 million users per single exchange.
A big thank you once again to all those who helped us complete our initial Trusted Setup several months ago. For those who wanted to participate but didn’t get the tap on the shoulder last time, maybe expect an email mid-year :). Scroll to bottom of this page for the past and perhaps-future participants. And see here for the results/technical details of last time.
We have also deployed the smart wallet contracts to the Goerli testnet for testing our upcoming wallet app with built-in Loopring DEX.
Product
Loopring Exchange
We launched Loopring Exchange (beta1) on February 27.
This public beta has received a very warm response from the Ethereum and ZKP communities, which means so much to us. We appreciate that over 1,000 accounts signed up in the first weekend, and appreciate all the love on Twitter, Reddit, and across all the chat groups. It’s really motivated us and the highpoint of our 2.5 year history.
We had a little program that allowed the first 1,000 addresses to enter the exchange to become Lifetime Honor VIPs, enjoying the lowest trading fees on the platform forever more. Because it filled up much quicker than expected, we’ve extended it to the first 1,500, so 500 more spots (now about 400 left). More info on the Honor VIP program here. Besides the lowest fees, you also get this cool crown on your dashboard! [Maybe a low-key Etherean status symbol!?]
We have collected precious feedback from many users. A large percentage of users feel the trading speed is super fast, which resembles the experience of centralized exchanges. They also tell us how great it feels to trade on such an orderbook exchange without having to worry about the safety of their assets at all. This has been music to our ears, and is why we exist.
But we know there are a lot of things to improve in the user experience. For example, the withdrawal time is a bit too long and the communication of deposit processing is not very clear. Basically entering & exiting the zkRollup environment is where the UX hurdles are. Once on the exchange, users enjoy a blazing fast, enjoyable experience. Some reasons why these hurdles remain are explained in this brief thread. TL;DR: we need more users and more demand to fill up/prove batches quicker! We will continue to improve the application by releasing a major version every two weeks and pushing small versions to production daily.
If you want to list your ERC20 tokens on Loopring Exchange or suggest a project we should list, please reach us at exchange@loopring.io. For projects that push Ethereum’s ecosystem forward, we will try our best to minimize your liquidity costs. [We just need to make sure we can have some initial depth on the books for the new pairs].
Loopring Explorer
Due to the busy launch of the DEX product throughout February, the development of the Loopring Explorer (DEX Browser) temporarily slowed down.
In the meantime, you can check out related data and stats regarding Loopring Exchange on https://duneanalytics.com/loopring. This dashboard shows transaction count, deposits/withdrawals, block count, gas used, accounts created, and more. But to view volume stats, Dune Analytics can’t parse that without our library for which the Explorer is needed. We’d suggest checking the actual exchange at Loopring.io to get a sense of 24hr volumes on the pairs.
Loopring Relayer
We completed the annual planning at the relay module level. The team will continuously optimize and improve the system from the three dimensions of “availability”, “ performance”, and “user acquisition”.
In February, our relayer team completed several system optimizations and successfully supported the launch of Loopring.io and WeDEX (wedex.io). The relayer now supports different transaction fees according to the user level. We also enhanced the gateway’s throttling functionality. At present, the relayer can support continuous 100 transactions per second; after the planned optimization, this throughput will be significantly improved. Recall, current max protocol throughput is 2,050 tps; relayer remains bottleneck.
We have improved the Merkle tree reconciliation function. Currently, it is a reconciliation of accounts, and subsequent verification of accounts and orders will be added. Our target is to reduce the reconciliation interval to less than one hour. Many centralized exchanges do not have reconciliation in place at all (such as the recently closed FCoin); the reconciliation in Loopring’s relayer is similar to the Alipay system, which ensures high internal and external data consistency.
We have also researched how to put our new prover in a “server mode” for continuous running to reduce proving cost. The work is still a work-in-progress but we are confident it will be done within two months. The new prover will greatly reduce the proving cost, which allows us to process user deposits and distribute user withdrawals much faster.
Loopring Smart Wallet
Loopring’s smart wallet is a mobile app designed specifically for the Chinese market to ease the onboarding of non-technical users to Ethereum and DeFi applications. The launching of Loopring Exchange verified our thought that many people in China are having trouble using Chrome + MetaMask. We believe our Smart Wallet will bridge the gap between these users and dapps, Loopring Exchange included.
We completed an internal audit and testing of the smart wallet contracts. The code has been deployed on Ethereum’s Göerli testnet. Our engineers are also working on the wallet backend and the mobile app. We are testing modules internally already, and aim to launch the first beta in May.
Operations
Around Town / In The News
Loopring’s Head of BD, Matthew Finestone, went to ETHDenver — which was incredible. With over 2,000 Ethereum enthusiasts and developers, it is difficult to describe the experience. It’s also difficult to imagine how such a passionate and talented community can be stopped in their pursuit of a better financial system, social institutions, internet, and basically everything.
Matthew gave two talks: one about Loopring protocol and our zkRollup performance stats, and one about the dxDAO (of which Loopring is a large stakeholder).
Here are some photos from the weekend.
As for the news section, honestly, we are so humbled for the attention some of the best curators, commentators, and leaders in the Ethereum space have provided of our launch and advancement, it is too numerous to list here. Just check out your favourite Ethereum news sources, especially from past week!
LRC Staking
The amount of staked LRC has exceeded 120 million LRC. Among them, our team members staked more than 29.5 million, the Loopring Foundation staked more than 46.5 million, and LRC token holders combined staked 44.8 million. We have decided to stake the subsequent 220 million LRC held by the Foundation every month as they are unlocked. More context on that can be found in this article.
To reward people for staking (especially before protocol fees pick up with increased volume), we will deposit 2 million LRC as a reward for all participants around May 1st. Of course, we will deposit these LRC into Loopring’s protocol Fee Vault. You can always keep track of the LRC balance in the vault address. These are the rewards that are paid out to stakers.
We strive to provide a convenient UI for LRC staking on Loopring Exchange before May 1. If this feature gets delayed, you may want to learn to interact with the staking address using Etherscan’s interface. It only takes a few minutes and two transactions with the smart contracts. Staking instructions can be found in the middle of this article.
As the first 90 day period since staking began is coming up soon, we will soon release a post instructing how / when to claim rewards. Again, it will be a simple transaction to the smart contracts on Etherscan.
Loopring is a protocol for building high-performance, non-custodial, orderbook exchanges on Ethereum using zkRollup. You can sign up for our Monthly Update, learn more at Loopring.org, or check out a live exchange at Loopring.io.
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