The New Multi-Network Loopring: Loopring’s Evolution + Repositioning
Loopring has been around since 2017 and over this time the name has become familiar to many people in the crypto space — but depending on who you ask, Loopring can mean something completely different — as it has evolved a lot since 2017 when it was just an order matching protocol on Ethereum’s mainnet. We feel the time is now right to update our image, unveil a new core pillar, and reposition the many unique Loopring products in the ecosystem to help everyone understand where we are today and where we are headed.
The name Loopring can mean a different thing to different people, depending on who you ask — up until today, Loopring has had 3 core pillars:
- Loopring the ZK-Rollup Protocol — an application-specific Layer 2 (now also Layer 3) ZK-Rollup protocol built on top of Ethereum
- Loopring the DApp — bringing users unique DeFi, earning and smart/automated trading opportunities, as well as an NFT ecosystem direct to their self custodial wallets — currently accessible by connecting any Ethereum wallet on any computer through the web app (loopring.io) or through the Loopring Smart Wallet mobile app where it’s directly baked into the user experience on L2
- Loopring the Smart Wallet app — giving Ethereum users the best security and the most flexibility for their crypto + NFT assets — with many innovative security features built into the mobile app
While all of these products do technically fall under the Loopring umbrella, they are very different products that deserve different positioning because of their unique target markets as well as their unique roadmaps and strategies for gaining adoption.
Moving forward these 3 core pillars will become 4 as Loopring becomes a multi-network, all-inclusive super app across crypto — going wherever users are.
Today we are announcing the expansion of the Loopring DApp, which will be a big piece of this as it grows into 2 separate DApps — Loopring Pro + Loopring Earn.
The Loopring Smart Wallet will also become a multi-network app, aiming to be crypto’s number one wallet, available to every user across the world.
The future of Loopring looks more like this:
Loopring Pro stack:
- Loopring ZK-Rollup Protocol — the powerful underlying infrastructure that brings scale and speed to all of our products built on the second layer of Ethereum
- Loopring Pro DApp — the original full DApp (loopring.io) that will remain the core of Loopring L2 on Ethereum + the foundation for all of our new product integrations
- Loopring Smart Wallet app — crypto’s most secure and most powerful all-inclusive wallet — with the Loopring Pro DApp experience baked into the experience on Loopring L2
The New Multi-Network Loopring stack:
- Loopring ZK-Rollup Protocol — the powerful underlying infrastructure that will bring scale and speed to our new multi-network effort — whether deployed as a Layer 2 ZK-Rollup or a L3, it will scale the products deployed on top
- Multi-Network — Loopring Earn DApp — the new ‘lighter’ version of Loopring Pro — reworked, customizable and able to deploy across any network in combination with our ZK-Rollup protocol (as a Layer 2 or L3) for scale + speed — bringing users unique, innovative DeFi products across many networks
- Multi-Network — Loopring Smart Wallet app — crypto’s most secure and most powerful all-inclusive wallet will also expand across many networks — with a customized Loopring DApp experience baked into the experience in each network location — Loopring Smart Wallet aims to be crypto’s #1 self-custody wallet, available wherever users are
But more on this below👇
Loopring ZK-Rollup Protocol: Evolution 🔵
Loopring Protocol first came into existence back in 2017, with the official whitepaper released later in that year.
It began as one of Ethereum’s first decentralized exchanges (DEX), but we quickly realized the limitations of Ethereum’s base layer and decided to build the first-ever ZK-Rollup Layer 2 on top of Ethereum to help to scale the DEX.
Loopring Protocol has come a long way since its evolution from Loopring Protocol 1.0 with basic token exchange on Ethereum to Loopring Protocol 3.6, where we are today.
Loopring Protocol 3.6 is now a highly optimized, application-specific ZK-Rollup on L2 of Ethereum with orderbook DEX and AMM/swap functionality built into the design.
This latest protocol design has now been in production since December 2020 and has been very well battle tested with over 210,000 L2 wallets activated, over 12 million transactions, and around $6 billion of volume flowing through it.
Loopring ZK-Rollup Protocol: Future 🔵
We are very confident with this implementation of the ZK-Rollup and while we currently do not have plans to adjust Loopring Protocol 3.6 to add more features or functionality at the smart contract level in the near future, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any innovation.
Instead, the focus moving forward for the ZK-Rollup will be to deploy and integrate this battle-tested framework in more places (i.e., L3 on Taiko, Arbitrum + many more) to help scale and expand our newer core products — namely the Loopring Smart Wallet and the Loopring Earn DApp.
We will also continue to build and innovate on the Loopring Pro stack, which is built on top of our original ZK-Rollup Layer 2 on Ethereum. Keep reading on to the “The DApp: Future” for more updates on this all.
Loopring DApp: Evolution 🔷
Up until today, the Loopring DApp has been mainly known as the (Loopring.io) web-app, which has been the front-end, user-facing app that gives everyone access to Loopring L2-built products.
It has primarily been a DApp that lives on the Loopring L2 protocol on top of Ethereum. Moving forward however, we are re-building the structure of the DApp to make it deployable across any network.
Much like Uniswap is a DApp built on top of Ethereum and can be deployed on any network in Ethereum, now, the Loopring DApp will also have this capability.
Loopring DApp: Future🔷
We are happy to unveil that the Loopring DApp is officially expanding and becoming 2 separate DApps, with the introduction of the new Loopring Earn DApp.
Introducing Loopring Pro + the new Loopring Earn
Splitting the Loopring DApp into two separate user-experiences that can be targeted at different user sets will be key to a wider adoption of Loopring products.
➡️Loopring Pro DApp (the loopring.io DApp) — will be an ever expanding product offering for our core users — offered to users directly on L2 and tightly coupled with the Loopring protocol on Ethereum L1.
➡️Loopring Earn DApp — will be a less expansive, but multi-network experience containing our most popular, and innovative core products to help introduce more users to the Loopring ecosystem by putting the Loopring brand + products in front of where even more users already are.
The Loopring Pro stack on Loopring L2
The Loopring Pro DApp will be the foundation for all of our new product launches. Successful products with wide product market fit can then be added into the lighter, Loopring Earn DApp to deploy elsewhere as well to help draw more users into the ecosystem.
As far as new innovation coming to the Loopring Pro stack, you can expect a lot more in the automation and smart trading front.
We believe the future of investing will be a lot more automated and passive, with things like artificial intelligence (AI) built into more investing strategies + products to help users make better investing decisions and take away the difficult aspects like constant active intervention and decision making.
We have already started moving in this direction with our recent partnership with CIAN, to give users access to more automated vault strategies, allowing users to set + forget and let the vault do the active management to help bring them higher returns. Keep an eye out for a lot more from this partnership.
We are also bringing more smart, automated trading strategies to Loopring users. This will allow for many automated trading bots to be deployed on behalf of users, like grid trading strategies to help capture more returns from volatile markets.
Other big products coming to the Loopring DApp to look forward to include leveraged vaults, allowing users to borrow, lend, trade long + short with leverage as well as possibly even trade more than just Ethereum-based tokens directly from their Ethereum wallets 🤯
All-in-all, the goal is to bring Loopring users a full NFT ecosystem, as well as all of the best DeFi and Earning opportunities across crypto direct to their self-custodial wallets, a true CEX alternative without ever having to give up custody of their assets. An all-in-one crypto super app at their fingertips.
This whole DApp experience will also always be baked directly into the Loopring Smart Wallet. Users can have everything they need at their fingertips, while also sleeping well at night with the ultra-secure LSW containing social recovery and tons of other security features to back them up.
The New Multi-Network Loopring Earn✨
The Loopring Earn DApp will become the new ‘lighter’ version of the Loopring DApp, with the most popular and innovative DeFi + earn products packaged into it so that it can be much more easily deployed in many other networks.
Much like how Uniswap or Aave are DApps built on top of Ethereum and can be deployed on any network in Ethereum, now, so can the Loopring DApp — through the new Loopring Earn DApp.
The main difference currently between a DApp like Uniswap or Aave and a DApp like Loopring Earn, is that instead of the DeFi + earning products in the Loopring DApp being fully run by smart contracts, they run through the use of the Loopring protocol thanks to our new DeFi Port functionality.
This means that in order to deploy Loopring Earn on top of other networks, we also need to deploy the ZK-Rollup protocol. It’s not as easy as copy-pasting the smart contract code like other DApps have the ability to do, but it comes with some benefits.
A big benefit of this approach is that by deploying our protocol as a L3 infrastructure on other networks (like Arbitrum, Taiko), we can create a highly optimized app-chain experience for the end-user. We can add functionality, improve the user-experience and work to optimize + lower fees for users, more-so than another DApp that is based on smart contracts, deployed directly on the L2.
Another big advantage of this approach is that we are not technically limited to only Ethereum or EVM-compatible chains. It is possible to deploy Loopring Earn + ZK-Rollup protocol on top of almost any other network to introduce even more users to the ecosystem.
With this approach, our plan is to deploy the Loopring Earn DApp + protocol in as many places as possible to give more users in each network unique DeFi + earning opportunities to help usher more users into the Loopring ecosystem by introducing them to the Loopring name along with our core products.
In certain cases, these deployments will be done by deploying the underlying protocol as L3 environments on these networks — not as full networks — but more as vault-like experiences on top of these networks.
Example: a user with funds already on Arbitrum L2 will be able to deposit their funds from Arbitrum to the Loopring L3 vault to then use those funds to experience all of the DeFi + earning opportunities within the vault — funds won’t be transferable between other users, they will only be accessible to the user to deposit, use in the products and withdraw from the vault.
In some cases though, it might make more sense to have a full-fledged L3 network. In the case of Taiko for example, this will be the approach. Each network may even have slightly different product offerings based on the target market.
We will share more announcements on these exciting updates as we get closer to the deployments.
Loopring Earn DApp Target Market
The Loopring DApps have very large TAMs (total addressable markets). While Loopring Pro also contains some front-end access to things like NFT minting, the core of both the Loopring Pro + the new Loopring Earn DApps is primarily an investing product, allowing users to earn passively and actively with their assets in their self-custodial wallets.
You could compare this to the traditional finance (TradFi) world where according to a 2022 report by the World Bank, the global average for stock market (or related investment instruments) ownership is around 23%. However, there is a wide range, with some countries having ownership rates as high as 80% and others as low as 1%. In the United States for example, this figure is around 60% of the population that has invested their money.
When you look at the value of these global markets the numbers become staggering. Currently, there’s around $95 trillion invested in stock markets, combined with around $277 trillion in global debt, and $281 trillion in real estate. Compare this to the total market cap of crypto currently, sitting at around only $1 trillion, you can see there is a huge opportunity ahead of us to capture these global flows onto crypto rails.
Even with these figures as they are today, this is a very large market to target. However, we believe that with the way cryptocurrency, DeFi + self-custody help democratize the financial system, this could open up even higher percentages of the global population to take control of their finances and be able to invest in the future. Crypto can help remove barriers and make it easy for anyone with a smartphone to be able to invest even small amounts of money, into a wider range of investing products — both passive and active, to better control their futures.
We also believe that eventually all real world assets could one day become tokenized, including stocks, bonds, real estate, debt products, and much more. This means that a majority, if not all of these investment flows could one day be on crypto rails.
In the near term though, Loopring is focused on building out + expanding our core product offerings (as mentioned above) and to put these products in front of as many potential investors as possible.
In the future, as more and more people in the world come online into crypto, through the booms and busts of adoption cycles, Loopring Earn DApp will be placed in front of users, wherever they are, and positioned as a one-stop shop for all of your investing + earning needs.
Loopring Smart Wallet: Evolution 🔷
The Loopring Smart Wallet began its journey back in November 2020 with its first beta release on Ethereum mainnet.
This came shortly after Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum’s founder) wrote his paper on “Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets”, which included feedback from Loopring, as we were in the process of developing such a wallet at the time.
With all of the hacks and centralization failures across crypto, this paper has become even more relevant ever since, which is why Loopring has been putting a majority of its development efforts into optimizing and expanding this product to become ready for mainstream adoption.
“[Seed phrases] are not good enough… hardware wallets alone are not good enough… multi-sig is good… social recovery is better!” — Vitalik
Not only is the Loopring Smart Wallet highly secured by this innovative social recovery mechanism, we’ve also packed it full of other security features like:
- Cloud Backup + Recovery 2.0
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
- Daily Transfer Limits
- Whitelisted Addresses
- and more to come!
We believe the Loopring Smart Wallet is now at a point where it is highly optimized and advanced, being one of the most feature packed and secure wallets in all of crypto. It is now time to share it with more of the world!
Loopring Smart Wallet: Future 🔷
Our strategy moving forward is to deploy our smart wallet far and wide and get it in front of where even more users already are in the crypto space. We will also be more aggressive in marketing the Loopring Smart Wallet as a key product to help onboard more new users to the world of crypto in a safe way with a simple onboarding and overall user experience.
Look out for even more advancements in onboarding web 2 users in a much more streamlined way.
Loopring Smart Wallet browser app
A key part of onboarding more users to the Loopring Smart Wallet will be not only deploying it where more users are, but to also make sure the app is accessible to every type of user.
Enabling a full-featured Loopring Smart Wallet for PC, Mac and other web-based users will open the door for every user in the world to be able to experience the power and top-notch security of the LSW.
Look out for more announcements on this big development in the months ahead.
Loopring Smart Wallet Target Market
The Loopring Smart Wallet has the widest target audience of all of the Loopring products. Just as everyone in the world today has a wallet of some kind to carry around their money, bank or credit cards — in the future everyone will have a digital wallet, enabling them to truly be their own bank.
A wallet will be a user’s personal vault, to store not only their digital coins / money, and NFTs, but potentially many other things in the future.
As you can imagine, a simple seed phrase written on a piece of paper will not be sufficient for securing all of these assets if you want to be able to sleep well at night.
We believe that every person in the world will one day have a crypto-based wallet and we are positioning the Loopring Smart Wallet to be the only wallet a person ever needs — with the best security, and a full one-stop super app experience inside.
Onboarding the world to Loopring⚡️
Onboarding the rest of the world to crypto is a hefty goal, but it’s one we find exciting and ready to take on. We (at Loopring) are all very mission driven — we want the world to experience the freedom of crypto and help them to truly be their own bank and we hope that if you’re reading this, you find this mission compelling as well.
In general, there are 3 major steps necessary to a get any product mass adopted:
STEP 1: Have a solid product with mass appeal that users will love and keep coming back to (make it sticky!)
✅ We believe we now have very solid products in the Loopring Smart Wallet + Loopring DApps, both with mass appeal potential (see above).
STEP 2: Establish your target market (know who will care about this!)
✅ Done (see the target market sections above).
STEP 3: Get your product in front of your target market (it’s all about eyeballs!)
🔲 This is where we are currently.
The Loopring Smart Wallet, Loopring Pro DApp + Loopring Earn DApp are all end-user products, so we need to advertise them where the end users for these products are. A lot of the community has asked why we are not at many of the Ethereum conferences around the world. The answer to this is because end-users are not the primary focus of most of these conferences.
Many of these conferences (certainly not all, there are exceptions) are tailored to attract developers and/or investment. Most of the projects that attend these conferences are looking for exactly this — developers to build cool stuff on top of their infrastructure or major investors for private funding rounds.
Since Loopring is primarily focused on the end user, these conferences are not worth the large amounts of capital needed to get a booth and/or speaking slots.
That said, there will still be strategic events focused more around end-user adoption for Loopring to take part of or even sponsor — this just will not be a primary focus.
Our primary focus moving forward will be to:
- Deploy the Loopring Smart Wallet + Loopring Earn DApp far and wide, using our protocol for scale — so that Loopring is easily accessible to every type of user, exactly where they already are
- Use business development efforts effectively to attract other exciting products with large target markets (like Web 3 gaming + DeFi) to integrate or build on or with Loopring to help solidify our product offerings + ecosystem for end users
- Use marketing dollars effectively to get the eyeballs of our target market (the end-user) and bring them into the Loopring ecosystem
Upcoming marketing efforts may include (but not be limited to):
- referral marketing — it’s no secret in the marketing world that referral marketing often leads to higher conversion rates than more traditional forms of advertising — this is because people trust their friends and family, so a recommendation from someone close to you means a lot more than an advertisement
- influencer marketing — finding those who have influence over your target market and getting them to see your vision and share it will be a key
- incentivized competitions — using token + NFT incentives to attract new users as well as volume + liquidity onto Loopring products
- podcasts/spaces — attracting influencers and influential projects to come speak with us to help with outreach to attract new eyeballs
- podcasts/community calls — for onboarding and educating new users
- educational content — for making Loopring as simple as possible for new users to onboard onto + experience all the ecosystem has to offer
- targeted social ads — for getting new eyes on our products as well as better name recognition
- strategic conferences — for networking with other crypto projects and for attracting new users to the new multi-network Loopring ecosystem
We’ve got a long road ahead to onboard the billions of users remaining that still have not heard of or interacted with crypto — but it will be an exciting one!
While this plan represents our general strategy, note that at any given time, not everything we are working on can be made public, and some products, partnerships or strategies may not be able to be mentioned until they are released or finalized.
Stay tuned to our socials (X(Twitter), Discord, Reddit, Instagram) for the most up-to-date information and news.
New socials for the Loopring Smart Wallet + Loopring Earn
The Loopring Smart Wallet is now strong enough to stand on it’s own. This is why we are now unveiling new social handles for the wallet, starting with X.com (follow us here).
We are also unveiling a new social handle for Loopring Earn, as it becomes a stand-alone DApp that will live across many networks, not just on Loopring L2 (follow us here).
We think this is an important step to be able to better target marketing and outreach efforts for these products, to bring the world into crypto through our all-inclusive, super-app ecosystem.
What to look out for next🔮
We’ve already talked publicly about our expansion plans to Arbitrum. This will be the next mainnet launch of the expansion of the Loopring Smart Wallet as well as our new Loopring Earn DApp experience.
The goal is to put Loopring products in front of as many users as possible — this means bringing Loopring to where even more users are. After Arbitrum we are looking at also deploying across many other networks, so stay tuned for announcements on these.
Taiko will also be a big expansion for us in the future once their mainnet launches. This will be a much closer partnership, with a full L3 network being deployed. It is still the fairly early stages for this as Taiko is still in alpha, but keep an eye out as we test more and more functionality and products on top of Taiko during their test phases prior to mainnet launch.
You can also expect us to keep on delivering like we always do with more innovative product launches in both of the Loopring DApps, and constant improvements to the Loopring Smart Wallet to make it the number one wallet in crypto.
As always, stay tuned to our socials and get involved in our communities across X(Twitter), Discord, Reddit, Instagram and subscribe to YouTube for all of the latest updates from the team as well as community news.
The next big adoption cycle for crypto is coming and we are ready to capture this next wave of adoption, as potentially billions of new crypto users come online over the next years ahead.
Interested in integrating or building on Loopring? — Reach out!
Check out our recently launched Developers Portal to get all of the latest developer guides and docs to help you get started with your integration.
Working on something big and want to deploy it on Layer 2? Loopring L2 is an application-specific ZK-Rollup on Ethereum. This means we can help you highly optimize your application to make it as scalable and seamless as possible on Ethereum.
This requires a little bit more technical work up front, but we are here to help you through the process to give your application the most optimized experience possible on Ethereum. Send us an email to: foundation at loopring dot io — or join our discord to get in quick contact with a team member.
About Loopring
Loopring is an Ethereum Layer 2 ZK-Rollup protocol for scalable, secure DeFi and NFT applications. Loopring builds non-custodial, high-performance products atop our L2, including the Loopring Wallet — a mobile Ethereum smart wallet, and the Loopring L2 web app — an L2 orderbook and AMM DEX. To learn more, follow us on Medium or see Loopring.org.
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