Loopring Monthly Update — 2020/04
We hope this past month was not too difficult for our readers and their families and friends. On our side, for the team based in Shanghai, as of this past week we have stopped working remotely and returned back to the office. We are all healthy and happy, and optimistic about what’s coming up next for Loopring.
The following are some updates from April.
R&D
Loopring Protocol
Work on protocol v3.5 has almost been finished with only a small number of things left to do. Most big features planned in the release were implemented last month and this month we continued writing tests. We also did a number of additional changes:
- Allowed exchanges to use a custom smart contract to manage the funds stored in the exchange. This makes it possible to use those locked funds in interesting and productive ways.
- Increased the maximum number of tokens that can be used on a single exchange from 256 to 1024.
- Simplified the protocol further by deprecating the dedicated order cancellation circuit (orders can still be canceled in many other ways) and by removing the label fields (which could be used as a custom identifier in some requests).
- Updated the smart contracts from solidity 0.5.11 to 0.6.6.
- Implemented Fast Withdrawals. This functionality is not built into the main protocol, it’s made possible by two new features in 3.5: Conditional Transfers and Agents. Fast Withdrawals are just one of the many features that can be added to exchanges this way.
Loopring Exchange
We launched the Loopring API. Professional traders can now use these API in their existing trading-bots to arbitrage between CEXs, DEXs. and Loopring Exchange. To speed up the adoption of our new API, we will soon launch a Market Making Competition with generous rewards in USDT. If you are interested, maybe you want to start looking into our API documentation now:
In other Loopring.io developments, our deposit and withdrawal time reduced from ~40 minutes to ~20 minutes, thanks to the optimization in our prover. Note, these ~20 minutes are to enter & exit the zkRollup exchange, all actions once on the exchange — such as trading — are instantaneous.
Loopring Exchange now supports WalletConnect. Now you can use Loopring.io by scanning QR codes with your favourite WalletConnect-compatible mobile wallet app.
We adjusted the colour themes, launched a new price-chart, and added links to our newly launched API documentation, as well as our newly launched referral program and a fan-made LRC staking dApp (both of which you’ll read more about below).
Loopring Wallet
We improved how wallets are created and how the daily quota is enforced. We also simplified the way guardians are added and removed after a delay for security, which can now be done in a single transaction instead of two. Besides these changes, the solidity codebase is stable and contains no additional changes.
We have chosen to employ Solidified to audit our smart wallet implementation, the work will start in a few days. We will also start our internal security audit very soon.
Many of the wallet app’s core functionalities have been developed and are working. Our mobile app engineers continued testing the mobile app and backend. There are still many outstanding issues, but we will soon have an internal beta in May.
Loopring Relayer
We launched daily account reconciliation in production which verifies that the balances among our relayer’s different sub-systems are indeed consistent (otherwise alerts will be raised for manual inspection).
Our relayer is now capable of building and submitting blocks of all sizes supported by the Loopring protocol, including the biggest and most efficient, 1024-trade settlement blocks. This marks an important milestone for Loopring: we have optimized our relayer’s performance to an extreme in terms of batch-processing layer-2 requests. Further optimization will focus on the selection of cost-efficient hardware on various could computing platforms.
As a matter of fact, we have already tried to run prover on Google Computing (GCP). Our preliminary results show that GCP’s cost and performance are both slightly better than AWS, but we need further testing and more data to support switching the prover to GCP.
Our work on internal stream computing is also near completion. On top of the system, we implemented algorithms to calculate rewards for market-making, referral, and a new program we called “orderbook mining” which will be launched in May.
We deployed the auto-shipping of compiled binaries to the UAT (testing) environment and we will enable it for our production environment in May. We have also launched a back-office system for data analysis and monitoring.
Operations
Statistics
Loopring Exchange has settled more than 840K trades since our launch two months ago, corresponding to around $14M in volume. Our realized throughput is much higher than all other Ethereum DEXes, while only paying a small fraction of the gas cost per trade. This is what zkRollup was meant for! We currently have only 1,600+ users, but the number is growing slowly but steadily.
It is also worth mentioning that the relayer’s batch processing has been optimized since April 16th. Smaller settlement blocks are now much more rare. In other words, overhead costs are being amortized over a greater number of trades per block, so the cost-per-settlement has been reduced.
Blocks that are not green are account registration, password resets, deposits, and withdrawals. We’ll see their numbers go down once we have more active users.
In The News
Loopring has been included on DeFi Pulse, the popular DeFi dashboard, notably displaying their total value locked (TVL) metric by each DeFi project. It now shows the total value locked in Loopring (as a protocol) has exceeded 5 million US dollars. This value is across Loopring.io, and WeDEX.
Loopring has also been included on Token Terminal, a financial metrics website for crypto protocols. Notably, it displays the price-earnings (PE) ratio for several DeFi protocols.
Daniel’s Interviews
- Daniel also went on Bilibili for a video streaming chat with several thousand members from our Chinese-speaking community, transcribed and translated here.
Loopring Exchange launched a referral program
Our referral program on Loopring.io rewards both you and the new users you successfully referred. You will get up to 60% of all the trading fees from friends you refer.
Loopring partners with tBTC
Loopring became one of tBTC’s launch partners, which also includes Uniswap, Kyber, 1Inch, Compound, and many more. tBTC, running on the Keep Network, is considered among the more decentralized and trustless cross-chain BTC projects. We will list the TBTC/USDT trading pair on Loopring Exchange when tBTC launches in mid-May.
Analysis of Cryptocurrency Exchange Regulation
Matthew Finestone, our BD Director, wrote a detailed analysis of the cryptocurrency exchange regulatory guidance put forth by the Canadian Securities Administrators. It is very bullish for non-custodial exchange tech.
AMA with Guarda Wallet
Matthew Finestone also did an AMA with the Guarda Wallet community.
Trading Competition Recap
We released an analysis of the Loopring.io trading competition which finished March 31st. TL;DR, lots of trades settled by the protocol. Highest was 80k in one day.
Upcoming Events
- May 2nd — Jay Zhou, Loopring’s COO, will join DeFi Discussions (held by DystopiaLabs) to share how zkRollup and Loopring can handle black swan events and congestion such as the Black Thursday on March 13.
- May 6th — Daniel will appear on Epicenter for an interview, one of the most popular and longest running podcasts in crypto space.
- May 8th — Matthew will present zkRollup DEX scaling and Loopring Exchange at Ethereal Virtual Summit.
- Mid May — Daniel will join Shenzhen Blockchain Week as a panelist with Vitalik Buterin.
LRC Staking
We launched a fan-made LRC staking dApp:
The code was authored by Nolan Vanmoortel and was audited by Freeman Kong from Loopring. We welcome further code inspection, optimization, and new features. Thanks Nolan! Nolan’s version remains available here.
You can use the dapp to stake LRC, claim protocol fee rewards, and withdraw LRC back to your wallet. Staking LRC will earn Loopring’s protocol fees which are 0.06% of all the aggregated trading volume on all Loopring-based exchanges. Current rewards in the fee vault for stakers equals over $40k (70% to stakers, 20% set aside for a community run DAO, 10% burnt).
An Open Challenge
We promised to provide 2 million LRC as a reward for early LRC stakers, as protocol fees may take a while to hit full force with large volume. One million LRC has already been deployed to Loopring’s fee vault (feevault.lrctoken.eth). With protocol fees attributed from Loopring Exchange and WeDEX (0.8 million LRC and 10 ETH), the fee vault now holds more than 1.8 million LRC and 10 ETH as staking reward. We encourage those who staked early enough to claim their reward ASAP.
Note that only LRC can be claimed as staking reward, not ETH or other ERC20 tokens — someone has to convert them into LRC first.
So we present this open challenge:
If someone can convert all Ether in the fee vault to LRC before 00:00 May 15th, CST, we will deposit the other 1 million LRC into the fee vault as a reward.
Take a look at the fee vault smart contract, convert the ETH into LRC via some mechanism, and be the hero who unlocks an extra 1 million LRC for stakers: https://etherscan.io/address/feevault.lrctoken.eth
Update:
Our commpunity acted quickly and this open challenge has been successfully closed.1,000,000 more LRC has been deposited to Loopring’s protocol fee vault to incentivize earlier stakers.
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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