Hello to all Loom lovers and followers! For those who are a little behind of times, there was a lot of essential news these weeks. The project hits a home run! Since the team launched PlasmaChain staking in April — you have all staked well over 215,679,841+ LOOM tokens to help secure the chain! That’s around 30% of the current circulating supply! And now, the team releasing an open-source wallet to make your life even easier! It’s called Loom Wallet — and it will be integrated into the staking dashboard to give you a seamless experience. Of course, you already know about PlasmaChain. For those who aren’t familiar, it is Loom’s mainnet, which bridges other Loom sidechains to Ethereum and other major blockchains. It is optimized for highly-scalable user-facing dApps, and enables secure asset transfers between chains. A couple of months ago, the Loom team hired an external firm Trail of Bits to audit their PlasmaChain and Transfer Gateway code. Some of Trail of Bits notable clients include Western Digital, Facebook, and DARPA. In the blockchain industry, they’ve done security audits for Parity, Gemini, and Tendermint, among many others. During these weeks, the auditors did a manual code review of the loom binary, the Ethereum mainnet smart contracts that make up the Transfer Gateway, and the DPoS system, and further tested the code. All issues uncovered in the audit have been acknowledged, fixed, and tested thoroughly, and additional security enhancements have been implemented — making PlasmaChain more secure than ever! Now that the Loom team ensured the security of PlasmaChain, they’ve made the code open source. This is an important step toward making the chain a fully decentralized network! Recently Loom’s PlasmaChain was integrated with TRON, which means TRON developers can directly interact with all dApps built on PlasmaChain. Last week Loom announced its integration with web3 providers Portis and Fortmatic. That lets developers build dApps without extensions or downloads! As for the social side, Loom CEO Matthew Campbell talked about NFT and blockchain gaming at Manila meetup on June 26th, BlockchainBrad speaks with James Duffy, CMO of Loom Network for a detailed update. Developers have been working extremely hard over the period of the last two weeks so many updates on ecosystem projects appeared. The community is quite active and it keeps growing. Stay tuned for Loom updates in the coming weeks!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Loom PlasmaChain Completes Third-Party Security Audit and Is Now Open Source
A couple of months ago, the Loom team hired an external firm to audit their PlasmaChain and Transfer Gateway code.
Why Do a Security Audit?
Public blockchains are designed to be decentralized — meaning there is no central authority that can censor transactions. However, this also means there is no central authority you can appeal to in case of fraudulent transactions or hacks.
Hence, ensuring the security of a blockchain is paramount. And since the team takes security so seriously here at Loom, they made sure to have a proper security audit done by a reliable third party.
Meet their auditor: Trail of Bits
Trail of Bits is an information security company founded in 2012 by industry leaders Dan Guido, Dino Dai Zovi, and Alexander Sotirov.
Some of their notable clients include Western Digital, Facebook, and DARPA. In the blockchain industry, they’ve done security audits for Parity, Gemini, and Tendermint, among many others.
The Loom team wanted the best security experts to test their code, and based on their track record, they hired Trail of Bits for the audit.
Audit Details
The PlasmaChain security audit was done from April 1st to May 3rd of 2019.
The auditors did a manual code review of the loom binary, the Ethereum mainnet smart contracts that make up the Transfer Gateway, and the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) system, and further tested the code as following:
- Loom binary: reviewed the loomchain repository, developed a fuzzer, and performed manual dynamic testing
- Transfer Gateway: reviewed the transfer-gateway-v2 repository, ran Slither on the code, and performed manual dynamic testing
- DPoS system: reviewed the dposv3 repository, developed a fuzzer and invariant checker, and performed manual dynamic testing
Results
All issues uncovered in the audit have been acknowledged, fixed, and tested thoroughly, and additional security enhancements have been implemented — making PlasmaChain more secure than ever.
And to maintain this high level of blockchain security, the team plans on having regular third-party security audits performed in the future.
Open Sourcing the Code Base
Now that the Loom team ensured the security of PlasmaChain, they’ve made the code open source. This is an important step toward making the chain a fully decentralized network.
You can view the code on their GitHub.
Introducing Loom Wallet — Easily Manage Your PlasmaChain Tokens and Game Assets
With Loom Wallet — you’ll be able to do things like:
- View your PlasmaChain assets and tokens (like LOOM, ETH, etc.)
- Send and receive tokens easily to other users on PlasmaChain
- Sign in with MetaMask
- Deposit and withdraw tokens to and from Ethereum
- Deposit and withdraw to and from other major chains (coming soon)
- View your game assets (i.e. non-fungible tokens, a.k.a. NFTs), and transfer them to other accounts — Initially, Relentless assets will be available, then other NFTs will be added in the future.
Keep in mind that the Loom Wallet DOES NOT store any of your private keys — in fact, Loom Wallet is simply an interface/manager to make your life easier.
Plus, since security is paramount and the team wants you to be able to take a peek into how the internals work — Loom Wallet is fully open source.
Other than that…
You should go ahead and try Loom Wallet right now 😉
Loom integrates with web3 providers Portis and Fortmatic:
#Universal transaction signing with Portis
Universal transactions signing works with Portis as well. The team has added a simple demo to their example repo. To see it in action, you must checkout the repo and follow the instructions in the README.md file.
#Universal transaction signing with Fortmatic
Fortmatic is an Ethereum wallet that lets developers build dApps without extensions or downloads. To see how universal transaction signing works with Fortmatic, head over to their example repo.
See also announcement tweets 1, 2.
Recently Loom’s PlasmaChain was integrated with TRON, which means TRON developers can directly interact with all dApps built on PlasmaChain.
Read the guide which walks you through the basics of building a simple web app that lets users deposit and withdraw TRX between Shasta and Loom Testnet.
The team has also built a small demo project to showcase this functionality. The source code is available here.
Social encounters
Loom Update | BlockchainBrad | Next-Generation Blockchain | Agnostic L2 Scaling | Blockchain Gaming: BlockchainBrad speaks with James Duffy, CMO of Loom Network for a detailed update.
June 26th: CEO Matthew Campbell talked about NFT and blockchain gaming at Manila meetup.
Upcoming events:
No updates.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (information from Etherscan.io)
Introducing trading for Loom Network (LOOM) on Ethfinex.
Token will be made available against USD and ETH with 0% maker-fees!
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Roadmap
Loom Network Roadmap 2019
Top-Level Company Objectives:
- Staking: Maximize the percentage of the total LOOM supply that is staked on PlasmaChain
In the short and medium-term, improving staking metrics will be one of the primary focuses of the company, as it will have significant benefits in securing PlasmaChain and injecting more value into the network.
At the time of writing, Loom’s staking dashboard shows that around 30% of the circulating LOOM supply has been staked to validators so far. Loom plans to get this closer to 50%. Delegators are already earning up to 20% per year (minus validator fees) on their staked LOOM.
Future plans:
a) Integrate staking with all the major crypto wallets (including mobile)
In the coming weeks, Loom Network will be working with wallet providers to add native staking support for Trezor, Trust Wallet, imToken, and a few others.
b) Signing PlasmaChain transactions using Ethereum wallets — the smoothest cross-chain UX possible
PlasmaChain recently had its first decentralized hard fork, which added functionality for users to sign transactions on PlasmaChain using their Ethereum account. That means users can now sign PlasmaChain transactions using MetaMask or any mobile Ethereum wallet.
Loom Network is going to integrate this support into the staking dashboard, which will decrease the number of steps necessary to transfer and delegate tokens on PlasmaChain and massively improve the UX.
Whereas previously users had to save a new seed phrase for their private key on PlasmaChain, with this change, users will be able to simply use their existing MetaMask wallets to sign for and access their PlasmaChain account.
c) Other dashboard UI improvements
Loom Network has a number of other improvements under development that will improve the overall functionality and UX of staking, such as:
- Automatic re-delegation of rewards, so the rewards you earn from staking can be automatically re-staked
- Multiple delegations per user, so users can choose multiple delegation timelines with the same validator
d) Onboarding more validators
The team is in the process of onboarding a few more big-name validators in the space. Having a set of reputable validators securing our chain not only does a lot to legitimize PlasmaChain — but each of these validators also comes with their own community, their own reach.
And having a diverse set of properly incentivized parties trying to get more capital on board and staked to secure PlasmaChain is a major driving force in increasing the percentage of LOOM tokens staked.
- End-User Adoption: Make PlasmaChain one of the most widely used blockchains in existence, measured by DAU (Daily Active User) count and TVL (Total Value Locked) on chain.
Staking is important to secure the chain, and will help a lot to drive adoption in the short-term. But in the long-term, the success of any blockchain will be determined by metrics such as:
- the number of users interacting with that chain,
- the total economic value of tokens stored on that chain, and
- the value of fees generated by transactions on that chain.
Loom’s goal is to maximize these metrics, as these will be the factors that will determine the “staying power” of a blockchain platform in the long run.
a) Integrations with popular chains — adoption from the existing blockchain community
These integrations are such an important play, that they’ve dedicated an entire section of this roadmap below to discussing it in detail. But because one of the major benefits of these integrations is making PlasmaChain available to millions of existing blockchain users, it’s important to mention in this section about user onboarding as well. Loom network recently announced that it is building integrations with EOS and Tron in addition to Ethereum — and prior to that, Loom announced interoperability with Cosmos Hub. Integrating with these other blockchains means any user with an account on one of those chains — or any holder of that chain’s tokens — automatically has an account on PlasmaChain.
b) Developer onboarding
A blockchain is only as useful as the DApps it has running on it — so user adoption ultimately depends on developers building DApps people want to use. More apps are coming out of the woodwork each week.
These are totally independent projects who have one way or another discovered Loom and decided they’re the best platform available for their needs — not because they were paid money to build on Loom instead of the alternatives.
Loom Network is going to focus on revamping its developer documentation from the ground up to make it even easier for developers to get started building their first DApps on Loom, with clear examples of the most common use cases.
The goal is to take any developer who understands the basics of Solidity and deploying DApps with Truffle, and have them be able to deploy their first DApp to PlasmaChain and make it available to users on every major blockchain.
Loom is also going to open up PlasmaChain mainnet for any developer to deploy to in the near future. Due to this fact developer adoption is going to become a major focus of Loom’s over the rest of this year.
c) Bringing DeFi to PlasmaChain
DeFi is an area that has garnered massive interest recently, and is only growing over time. Loom will be shipping it in mid-2019.
The goal of these services will be to incentivize users to transfer and store their tokens on PlasmaChain — because having a lot of economic value stored on a blockchain increases its network effects, makes the platform more desirable to third-party devs, and solidifies the chain’s staying power vs. new chains that may spring up in the future.
d) Viral user onboarding through games — a trojan horse to being one of the most widely utilized blockchains
The major issue facing blockchains right now is making DApps good enough that people really want to use them. And lowering the UX barrier enough that there’s no onboarding friction for the average user.
Loom Network team wants PlasmaChain to be the most obvious choice for those developers to build on. And the best way to do that is to be the chain with the most authenticated users with accounts.
The best way to see thousands of users is gaming.
In the medium and long-term, games will help build PlasmaChain up to a critical mass of users with cryptocurrency available to spend, making it the most tempting platform to build on for developers of any type of DApp.
- Interoperability: Integrations With All Major Existing Blockchain Networks
This will give LoomNetwork an edge by allowing developers on PlasmaChain to access the user bases of all major chains. Why choose to develop your DApp for only one platform, when you can develop it for all platforms simultaneously?
If standalone blockchain platforms follow Metcalfe’s law, then a platform that integrates with and connects multiple blockchain platforms gets to take advantage of the network effects of all these platforms combined.
Interoperability brings additional value to each chain that is part of the network — and the hub that connects these chains will itself capture an immense amount of value.
Over the next year, the team’s focuses in this area will be:
a) Building out initial integrations with Tron, EOS, and Cosmos. These integrations are already in progress, and will be released one by one over the next few months.
b) Seamless wallet integrations on all platforms — sign with your native EOS / Tron / Ethereum account
As mentioned about, this means any Ethereum, EOS, and Tron user will be able to interact with any PlasmaChain DApp simply using their existing browser plugin or mobile wallet. Plus PlasmaChain DApps will be able to let users log in and authenticate using their existing Ethereum, EOS, or Tron accounts, rather than needing to sign up for a new account.
c) Integrate with any other networks in the future that reach a critical mass of user adoption
Different blockchain platforms may wax and wane in popularity as time goes on, and it’s possible new platforms will spring up to capture a significant portion of market share in the future. If new networks pop up that reach a critical mass of adoption, they’ll integrate them into PlasmaChain as well.
- On-Chain Fees: Generate additional on-chain fees to further incentivize PlasmaChain validators and stakers
For PlasmaChain, Loom plans to generate fees for validators both from DApp hosting fees, as well as from some core services built into the chain that all DApps will share:
a) DApp hosting fees
Loom will charge fees to DApp developers to host their DApps. A major difference between PlasmaChain and Ethereum is that with PlasmaChain, developers will pay a monthly fee to host their DApps as opposed to requiring every user to pay a fee each time they interact with a DApp.
b) Core chain services that generate fees
There are several core services Loom is going to offer on PlasmaChain, which will generate fees for validators/stakers.
One of these is the Loom Marketplace, which is an exchange for NFT assets.
Even for games building on Loom Network on their own separate DAppChain, they will want their in-game assets to be on PlasmaChain. This allows them to take advantage of the shared liquidity of the Loom marketplace, as well as the large number of Ethereum/EOS/Tron users authenticated with PlasmaChain who have funds to spend.
For each transaction on the marketplace, a small commission will go to the PlasmaChain validators — so as the number of popular games on PlasmaChain increases, so will the commissions earned by validators and stakers.
c) Fractional validation of child chains
Loom is envisioning a system that allows PlasmaChain validators to opt-in to use their spare hardware capacity to validate for child DAppChains that connect to PlasmaChain. For validators, a large part of their cost of operations is the manpower to monitor their hardware 24/7 to make sure it does not go offline. Thus, it’s somewhat trivial for a validator to spin up more hardware to validate for additional networks once they’re already validating PlasmaChain.
This setup would give validators opportunities to earn extra fees by validating additional chains — and pass a portion of those rewards on to their LOOM stakers. This effectively captures the value of the entire network of independent DAppChains back into the LOOM staking pool.
To sum up, over the next 6–12 months, it’s likely that there will be many more changes in the market and it’s difficult to predict them and Loom Network will need to shift to accommodate.
Partnerships and team members
Loom Network is now on Dapp Radar!
Read also How Loom Network is adding optionality and reducing friction for dapp developers in Dapp Radar blog.
Games ecosystem
Sorare is giving away SO5 cards (NFTs).
Experimental hosts 1st BIG monthly tournament.
Battle Racers pre-sale ends, raises 597 ETH.
Relentless Major Updates: New Emblem, New Characters, and New Features:
With this week’s game release (v0.1.25), the team is bringing you some fantastic updates that you’re going to love: the artwork, the main characters, revamped interfaces, and in-game pack rewards.
So as the team is now finishing up the game’s rebranding (both inside and outside of the game), the first thing they want to show you is the new badass logo.
The Emblem
The Champions
Aside from the game moving away from a zombie-centric theme, the team felt that the Overlords, while super cool-looking, were too alien and unrelatable as the main playable characters of the game.
So they made a shift toward more colorful and human-relatable characters to represent the elemental factions. They represent the six initial playable characters for players to assume the role of in campaign/story mode.
Looking ahead, they believe these new Champions will make the game richer and more meaningful — and they’ll tie in much better with the various types of creatures that the team will be conjuring up as they move forward.
In coming up with the identity and backstories of the different Champions, the focus was to make them unique and relatable to Relentless players.
They each have their own tragic stories in their exposure to goo. And their destinies lie in participating in the Relentless tournament, where they can utilize their talents and accomplish the goals they have set for themselves.
New App Features:
In-game Rewards
In-app Purchasing
In-app Pack Opening
Redesigned Card Frames
Revamped Interfaces
Gooey Goodness
Stability Improvements
Rumors
Twitter:
Experimental @e11io on Jul 1:
Oh you guys! you are making the TX count go through the roof… #CryptoWars on @loomnetwork
Reddit discussions:
Loom Network is now on DappRadar.
Let us make LOOM more popular than EOS! Leave a Like for LOOM and make LOOM the #1 cryptocurrency.
LOOM Network hit 10% of Ethereum daily transactions count on Saturday twitter.
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Loom community continues to grow! There is a constant increase in the number of followers these weeks. However, the number of subscribers of the Loom Network telegram channel slightly decreased these weeks.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Loom Network Twitter followers. The number of Twitter followers increases constantly. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
Loom Network Telegram channels:
🇺🇸 @LoomNetwork
🇨🇳 @LoomNetworkCN
🇯🇵 @LoomNetworkJP
🇰🇷 @LoomNetworkKR
🇹🇭 @LoomNetworkTH
🇪🇸 @LoomNetworkES
