Loopring Monthly Update — 2020/09
September was a busy month, where we most notably completed the code for Loopring 3.6 and submitted it for security audits. We also began preparing the Relayer to be upgraded to support 3.6. The Loopring mobile wallet continues to be polished, and we hope to invite a larger beta testing group in the coming two weeks.
R&D
Loopring Protocol
Completing Loopring 3.6 and submitting it for security audits is the culmination of four months of intense focus on this task. The upgrade represents a gigantic leap in terms of our protocol usability, flexibility, and efficiency vs 3.1. Having run Ethereum’s first zkRollup since December 2019, we have a lot to learn from, and we believe this protocol version packs a punch. We’d recommend reading the Loopring 3.6 feature list to get an understanding of what is coming, and can also see a more detailed comparison vs 3.1 here.
The big (and newest) feature that was announced a few weeks back is the support of AMM on zkRollup. We’re currently working on an AMM pool contract which will allow anyone to be a liquidity provider on Loopring. While AMM trading itself is built into the protocol, setting the AMM parameters and adding/removing liquidity to a pool is handled by a smart contract. This enables the creation of different kinds of AMMs using standard smart contracts.
We hope to have 3.6 deployed on the Goerli testnet in November and on the Ethereum mainnet in December. 3.6.0 is the pre-release we shipped for audits. The security auditor we chose is Least Authority for their expertise in working with zero-knowledge proof-based projects such as Zcash, and in general having audited Tezos, Ethereum 2.0 Specs, MetaMask, Cosmos, and more. We also began our bug bounty program for 3.6, and vulnerabilities can be reported until November 30th for LRC rewards.
For more information on Loopring 3.6, you can see the explainer video or slides two months ago.
Loopring Exchange
Users: The number of registered accounts on Loopring Exchange now exceeds 5,900, with a maximum of 277 users having registered in a single day.
TVL: The value of assets on the zkRollup is currently ~ $22.5m, having reached a maximum of over $25m during the month.
Volume: Volume picked up during September, with several days doing >$1m and with a daily max of >$1.61m.
Loopring Exchange has listed 11 trading pairs during the month: TON/ETH, BAND/USDT, WBTC/USDC, ETH-WBTC, QCAD-USDT, UNI/USDT, ADX/USDT, NIOX/ETH, KAI/USDT, PLTC/ USDT, OGN/USDT. Loopring Pay (transfers on the zkRollup) added support for 12 new tokens: UMA, STAKE, OGN, HEX, ENTRP, WNXM, NIOX, ADX, QCAD, UNI, KAI, PLTC.
Loopring Exchange now supports Authereum and Coinbase Wallet for connecting to Loopring.io, adding to MetaMask, WalletConnect, and MEW wallets.
An alternate UI was built that abstracts the Loopring Exchange orderbooks and provides users with a simple swap experience, and this one is mobile friendly! And of course still gas-free. You can visit the Swap UI at https://swap.loopring.io, and it works with your existing Loopring L2 account.
The code was built by the awesome Loopring community member/developer, Federico Luzzi. The code is open-sourced and can be seen at https://github.com/loopring/loopring-swap.
Loopring Exchange has been integrated into Autonio’s NIOX Market Making Software. For maximum liquidity, our Layer 2 Ethereum orderbook DEX requires active liquidity provision (placing and canceling orders as the market moves), but it’s not easy for non-technical users to build and run a bot. This software, complete with a simple GUI, greatly reduces the barrier for everyday users to run market making bots and provide liquidity on Loopring. This tool has been especially popular for liquidity miners. Autonio provided an update on how the NIOX-ETH pair has done on Loopring, and how their community loves providing liquidity and getting rewarded for mining.
We provided a general update on liquidity mining on Loopring, going over some near term plans, campaigns, and more. (Since then, a new one launched with OGN as BZRX completed). As a reminder, you can expect to see your liquidity mining rewards on/around the 1st of every month in your Loopring account.
An exciting point worth reiterating is that the Loopring Exchange will soon come to mean more than ‘just’ an orderbook exchange. It will have the AMM on there and orders being able to be filled from both the books and/or from the pools. More on our zkRollup AMMs in the operations section.
Loopring Wallet
We have optimized the wallet smart contacts to enable new wallet creation in two steps: the first step deploys uninitialized wallets as batches which can be done in advance when Ethereum gas price is low; the second step is the initialization of a wallet for each user (to set owner address, ENS, and other parameters) when the user registers — the gas price at the time is not predictable.
Besides reducing the overall smart wallet creation cost, this change also allows users to select addresses they prefer from hundreds of uninitialized wallets. The following are a few examples:
0x642150e3f0F16BC9eAa06B7b7D1ae29720666666 // score 0.5815
0x666666352f0422429a9CD9f51bE3d86E7bB55553 // 0.5812
0x9f1d0A12807D33FC90822835D0aB768f04999999 // 0.5700
0x11111115f870CA43dDa95004f14E841c1192d1e1 // 0.5675
0x000000f133956896FC14dcCBc85bF0E9b48c8840 // 0.5670
0x8888882b5A7ef61b0C3f5F0aE330CBd925EB5568 // 0.5668Random addresses are certainly free, but each ‘pretty’ address is priced based on its quality score.
Although ENS is certainly a better way of identifying wallets, we believe for the Chinese market, offering these pretty addresses is still very helpful for user acquisition and monetization.
The Loopring Wallet app received a new upgrade that has been shared to the beta-testers. The new version has most pages polished with the new design, the missing ones are all related to DEX. During this holiday season, we’ll complete the DEX UI design and publish another version soon.
Relayer
We updated the relayer API for Loopring.io (v3.1) which was having problems with order submission/cancellation:
- Order submission: please use the new submitOrderV3 API for order submission; the old submitOrder API will deprecate soon.
- Order cancellation: The current cancelOrders API’s behaviour has been changed, it now guarantees orders will be canceled.
We appreciate the help of our friends at Linq.network. They spent time testing our API and having fruitful conversations with us. We cannot have done this without their valuable feedback.
Our relayer team started working on a new relayer implementation to support 3.6 about three weeks ago. Now that the work for order-based trading are mostly complete, we expect to start integration and stress testing later this month. In the meanwhile, we are working over this Chinese National Day holidays to add AMM support to the new relayer. We hope to have an MVP in about ten days, without the UI though.
Operations
Rails, a layer 2 payment application governed by the DXdao and powered by Loopring has launched. It’s a slick application for gas-less and secure ETH and token transfers. The DAO has passed the proposal on-chain to host it on ENS and IPFS, and it is now live at https://rails.eth.link.
Loopring Exchange won the Hummingbot community vote that decided which exchange connector to support in the next Hummingbot release. Thus, the Loopring Exchange connector will be included in the Hummingbot codebase in the coming days. This is exciting as more market makers and algorithmic traders will participate on the Loopring venue. Thanks to Hummingbot and Linq Liquidity for the effort to get it merged.
We participated as sponsors in the Chainlink hackathon, where we put forth the task of implementing an AMM pool contract for our zkRollup. The task and relevant code are described here and is worth looking at for those thinking about deploying AMMs to layer 2, a very exciting prospect. For a much deeper understanding and technical workshop of how AMMs work on Loopring’s zkRollup, this video by our Chief Architect, Brecht Devos, is for you:
Gitcoin announced its plans to integrate Loopring Pay into its Grants program for the next round, round 8, to drastically reduce the gas cost for donations. It is doing the current round 7 with zkSync, another great zkRollup. (1 day left to donate to great Ethereum projects, go now! :)
Coinbase and Coinbase Pro listed LRC as did Huobi.
xDAI made a nice tutorial article on how to onboard to Loopring and sent their STAKE token.
Band protocol price feeds were integrated into the Loopring.io frontend to display faithful fiat prices for certain assets.
We paid out the first batch of market maker rebates to anyone who has ever had a maker order filled on Loopring Exchange. We will continue to pay them out every month around the 15th.
LRC was included in two awesome index products that give investors exposure to a basket of DeFi assets: PieDAO introduced the DEFI+S Index, and Set Protocol introduced the DeFi Pulse Index.
Stablecorp’s QCAD paired up against USDT to become our first ‘traditional’ FX pair on the venue, with a liquidity mining campaign ongoing.
Loopring Pay was integrated into an Argentinian POS system.
LRC was accepted to be included as MakerDAO collateral. That means LRC holders can lock up their tokens to borrow DAI against it. The parameters of LRC vaults can be seen here.
A small operational nudge to remember that when gas prices are “cheap” (whatever that means these days), it’s a good time to consider getting on Loopring layer 2 to save yourself gas for trades and transfers in the future.
In The News / On The Ground
We did a lot of video interviews and podcasts in September. Perhaps with the crazy gas prices on Ethereum, everyone wanted to learn about the leading solutions that are helping to ease this congestion. Some of them are:
Chris Blec with Matthew on explaining zkRollups, Part1 and Part2.
Bankless video AMA with Matthew on Loopring’s Layer 2.
DeFi Slate podcast with Matthew going over the Ethereum L2 landscape and Loopring.
Arcane Bear video interview with Matthew on DeFi and Ethereum scaling.
Loopring COO, Jay Zhou, participated in a forum held by Cointelegraph Chinese and an AMA with Crypto.com.
Dr. Steve Guo, CTO of Loopring Technology, participated in the Global Blockchain and Digital Finance Summit held in Hainan and participated in the panel on “DeFi Apps and Ecosystem Value-Add Scenarios”, where he shared the Layer 2 plan of Ethereum’s DeFi landscape.
As gas prices hit all times high, there was lots of news around Ethereum congestion and the layer 2 scaling solutions solving them, including Loopring’s zkRollup. Some of them are:
Loopring is a protocol for scalable, secure exchanges & payments on Ethereum using zkRollup. You can sign up for our Monthly Update, learn more at Loopring.org, or check out an exchange/payment app at Loopring.io.
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