Loopring Monthly Update — 2020/05

Daniel Wang
Loopring Protocol
Published in
8 min readMay 31, 2020

Loopring Exchange has settled over one million trades; we are launching Loopring Pay next week, a zkSNARK-based layer-2 fast transfer service, and getting ready for an invite-only beta testing for Loopring Wallet.

R&D

Loopring Protocol

We released Loopring 3.5 at the beginning of the month. You can read the most important changes in the release article. Later in this past month we added another feature to 3.5 to make accounts evenly distributed to the layer-2 Merkle tree. This enables relayers to easily shard the Merkle tree into a cluster for better throughput. We also enabled permissionless account registration so you can help your clients or friends register layer-2 accounts before sending them Ether and tokens via Loopring Pay.

Loopring 3.5 is an intermediary release towards our next big protocol release, Loopring 4.0. Loopring 4.0 will provide users with additional trading functionalities and trading instruments. The initial design has been created and is currently undergoing internal review. Preliminary development is already well underway.

We also released version 1.0 of the smart contracts of our smart wallet! This release contains multiple fixes and improvements found in the audit done by Solidified, but also improvements discovered while developing and testing the wallet app.

Loopring Exchange

We have improved how Loopring Exchange manages the layer-2 account keys. Our new approach doesn’t involve brain passwords and provides a much more simple and enjoyable user experience compared to centralized exchanges.

This month we added more 5 trading pairs, including KEEP/USDT, USDC/USDT, DXD/ETH, AUC/ETH, and RPL/ETH.

Loopring’s trading data is now indexed by CoinMarketCap, one of the leading blockchain data providers.

Loopring Wallet

We changed the wallet app codebase to use the most up-to-date smart contracts after our Solidified audit. All functionalities are tested on the Goerli testnet. Now we are trying really hard to launch the wallet on the Ethereum mainnet, and are just one step away from this goal. Once on mainnet, we’ll start using the app internally, then gradually involve more users to test it.

Loopring Relayer

Our relayer added support for Loopring Pay. Loopring Pay will enable our users to transfer Ether and ERC20 tokens to each other with immediate apparent finality, and without on-chain Ethereum transactions or gas fees. The transfer fee is negligible thanks to our zkRollup solution. Loopring Pay will be available on Loopring.io in early June. Loopring Wallet will also integrate Loopring Pay seamlessly. Ether and ERC20 token transfers among our wallet users will be fast and free.

So, as of this coming week, Loopring is not exclusively a scalable, secure exchange protocol, but also a scalable, secure payment protocol.

This is sorely needed on Ethereum right now, as transfers of stablecoins, especially USDT, are among the biggest gas guzzlers.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1260172228282527744?s=20

We believe Loopring Exchange and Loopring Pay will become the killer features in our mobile app. Our users will not be restricted by Ethereum’s ever-rising gas price and congestion, but still enjoy Ethereum’s security guarantees and everything else it offers.

These abilities will not be confined to Loopring Wallet and Loopring.io users, but also as a service to other wallets, non-custodial exchanges, and payment providers and apps. Any product that needs to move or trade Ethereum assets around quickly and cheaply without sacrificing security will be able to use Loopring’s zkRollup solution.

Our relayer is also testing the Offchain Withdrawal feature. Once launched, offchain withdrawal will allow users to request withdrawals without sending Ethereum transactions. This will reduce users' withdrawal costs and also make withdrawal much faster — the relayer no longer has to wait for 12 block confirmations.

We optimized our AWS deployment and successfully reduced cost by 30%. We are also working on other optimization so we can migrate some services to other providers to reduce costs even further.

Operations

Statistics

Loopring has settled over one million trades since our launch.

https://duneanalytics.com/loopring

For all those trades, we only paid a total of ~50 ETH. At ETH prices at that time (~$200), that means each trade cost only $0.01. That is the cheapest around by far, but we can currently reach two orders of magnitude lower — all it takes is more users and demand.

To celebrate this milestone, we held a small promotion and rewarded 10,000 LRC. The maker and taker of the 1-millionth trade will share 5,000 LRC reward; other traders in the same block will share the other 5,000 LRC reward. The millionth trade was performed by account IDs 1693 and 32, and the zkRollup block contained 127 other trades.

The reward will be distributed in the first week of June. We will also send rewards to those who reset their account keys before the end of May.

Added to our statistics this week, research firm Formal Verification did a deep dive into Loopring in their “In The Network” series. It goes over everything from our zkRollup data, Exchange data, LRC staking, and more.

https://twitter.com/_LewisHarland_/status/1265330884582014976?s=20

In The News

Ethereum has been experiencing a very high gas price throughout May. Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, pointed out that Sharding and Rollups will increase throughput and reduce the gas price. Loopring is proud to be the first and only 100% rollup DEX/payment solution on Ethereum — not only do we publish all required data, but we also publish it to the exact same network as the assets themselves, Ethereum.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1262147520735719427?s=20

Vitalik further let people know that Ethereum scales today, with Loopring.

DeFi Dad created an amazing video tutorial for using Loopring.io. These tutorials are very useful for people who have no experience using a zkRollup DEX (which is a lot of people since we are the first and only :). We strongly encourage people to take a look.

Video: How to Trade with a DEX and Beat High Gas Prices on Ethereum Using Loopring

We created a special code for DeFi Dad: register on Loopring.io with code “DEFIDAD”, and you receive VIP4 status for 1 year, 0% maker, 0.06% taker fees. DeFi Dad does not receive any referral kickback on this — it is only a benefit for users.

[A belated thank you to Crypto Owen who also created a great tutorial article last month on how to use Loopring.io].

Daniel Wang, Loopring’s founder, had an interview with Epicenter. Epicenter is one of the most well-known and useful crypto podcasts around, worth a listen to hear about Daniel’s background, Loopring’s origin story, and of course, all about zkRollup and the future of DEXs.

https://epicenter.tv/episodes/340

This month, Daniel also joined a panel hosted by Milin Finance and shared his perspective on DeFi and DEX. Daniel said DEXs will outcompete CEXs and become dominant once the following five issues are solved: security, throughput, cost, user experience, and cross-chain assets. He said Loopring is focusing and indeed solving the first four challenges but relies on the Ethereum community to figure out solutions for the last one.

Brecht Devos, Loopring’s Chief Architect, was interviewed by on Hidden Gems by Covalent. Brecht shared how Loopring uses zkRollup to scale DEX and payment and how zkRollup can scale Ethereum in general. This is a more technical talk — worth watching the video interview if you want to learn about zkRollup scaling technology in-depth.

https://youtu.be/edZPUeoCFCk

You can see the shorter video clip ‘Gems’ in this tweet thread, where Ganesh, Covalent founder, highlights many points.

We held an instructive poll on where the community thinks the first batch of zkRollup DEX users are more likely to come from, DEXs or CEXs. zkRollup DEXs provide the best of both worlds, so it will be interesting to watch.

https://twitter.com/finestonematt/status/1262825041814847492?s=20

Matthew Finestone, Loopring’s Business Director, delivered a presentation at the Ethereal Virtual Summit. He shared his perspective on zkRollup scalability and DEXs. Suitable for many (and even opposing) trader types, as you see below!

https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad/status/1258844867192483841?s=20

Matthew also presented Loopring Exchange and how DEXs will outcompete CEXs at DeFi Toronto.

Jay Zhou, Loopring’s COO, participated in the DeFi Discussion online panel hosted by DystopiaLabs. He asserted that the layer-1 DeFi projects will continue to suffer from Ethereum’s capacity limitation before ETH2 is available and that rollups are the best approach for scalability. He also shared Loopring’s throughput and cost improvements over layer-1 DEX solutions.

Steve Guo, Looopring’s CTO, streamed an interview with Lingbo Huang, a partner of Fenbushi Venture Capital. They discussed tBTC and the technologies behind it, as well as the potential of smart wallet apps.

We started to make educational short videos for the Chinese community, especially for the general non-crypto-native public. The first two are about crypto wallets and smart wallets. All videos will be available on TikTok. If you are interested, please follow us on TikTok, our ID is loopring.live.

Also of importance to us, the DXdao officially went live with its bonding curve fundraiser, which is/was a great success, and stood up its website, representing the first DAO to approve and install its own website via consensus: dxdao.eth.link. Loopring has been a DXdao reputation holder since inception, and continues to be one of its largest stakeholders. It is a bright spot in DAO governance, and continues to pick up momentum.

Upcoming AMA

  • June 1st, 4 PM (Shanghai time), Daniel will join an online AMA with guests from Binance and OKEx to discuss the current industry trends and prospects, then answer questions from the community. We welcome you to watch the AMA’s live stream and will reward selected users with up to 20,000 USD worth of tokens.
  • June 2nd, 7 PM (Shanghai time), Loopring and Nest will cohost an AMA on Zoom to talk about DeFi, price oracles, and DEXs.

Loopring is a protocol for building high-performance, non-custodial, orderbook exchanges on Ethereum using zkRollup. And as of this issue — a protocol for scalable and secure payments as well! You can sign up for our Monthly Update, learn more at Loopring.org, or check out a live exchange / payment app at Loopring.io.

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