Loopring Bi-Weekly Update — 12/01/2019

The last two weeks have been super exciting for us: Loopring 3.0 beta4 will finally complete deployment early next week. Loopring will be Ethereum’s first zkRollup DEX protocol enforcing on-chain data availability. We are ready to roll!

• We have received a strong security audit report for our smart contracts and circuit code from SECBIT Labs.
• Our zkSNARK trusted setup MPC has included a sufficient number of participants, where we are comfortable generating the initial keys for use.
• The Lightcone relayer is getting ready. It will support WeDEX, a partner who will very shortly launch the first Loopring 3.0 DEX as a public beta.

Loopring is having an offsite early December to brainstorm our 2020 R&D roadmap and finalize some details, the next bi-weekly will therefore be postponed by one week to the 22nd of December.

Research & Development

Loopring Protocol

Our phase 2 trusted setup ceremony has made a lot of progress. We are now at a total of 15 participants, which includes people of highly respected Ethereum projects and beyond. You can see the list of non-Loopring participants near the bottom of this post. We also created a small contest on Gitcoin, and Gitcoin has selected a winner who will participate in our trusted setup. We are creating the first set of proving and verification keys for the initial protocol v3 release on mainnet. As always, you can follow the progress of the ceremony here.

With the imminent release of protocol v3 on mainnet in mind, we created a small utility contract to delay operations on-chain. Some of our smart contracts are configurable, and if we would allow specific protocol parameters to change immediately, that could pose a security risk to users. This utility contract solves this by first forcing the operation to be visible to anyone on-chain for a certain amount of time before the actual change can be applied.

Smart Wallet

We have decided to develop a smart wallet mobile app for people in the mainland of China. We’ll provide more information regarding this app in our upcoming 2020 R&D roadmap which will be released in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Significant progress has been made on our smart wallet implementation, with most of the core smart wallet functionalities implemented: token transfers, social recovery, locking, transfer limits, meta transactions, etc. We expect to finalize the design before the end of the year, which will also mark the start of the smart wallet mobile app development. The smart wallet can stand alone, but will ultimately also be a very smooth gateway into some Loopring-based DEXes, and related functionality such as LRC staking.

DEX Frontend

WeDEX has cloned our DEX frontend codebase and continue their development. For further WeDEX updates, please follow them on Twitter.

Going forward, we’ll share progress with their team in the development of our smart wallet products.

Lightcone

The refactoring of the Lightcone relayer has made a lot more progress, and it is now close to completion. The current test coverage is over 90%. The system performs well when the multi-pod concurrent throughput is about 50 trades per second. We encountered some logical and performance problems during the stress test, including inconsistent states after recovery from failures of the matching engine; concurrency issues caused by parallel consumption of Kafka messages; JVM parameter configuration errors, Docker resource parameter configuration mismatch, etc. Most problems have been fixed already, and some are still under investigation. We expect the relayer will be ready next week.

Lightcone’s primary data storage services, including MySQL database and Redis, have switched to using AWS’s native offerings to ensure higher availability and better performance.

The Lightcone-to-WeDEX data synchronization mechanism has also been established with a delay of merely 500 milliseconds, which meets WeDEX’s quasi-real-time requirements.

Operations & Marketing

• 11/19/2019 — Loopring CMO, Jay Zhou, attended DAO Step Two in Shanghai, talking about the futures and trends of DAO.
• 11/20/2019 — SECBIT Labs delivered its Security Audit Report for Loopring Protocol 3.0 beta3. After careful review of the most up-to-date codebase, we believe all findings from SECBIT have been addressed.

SECBIT’s audit conclusion

• 11/22/2019 — LRC was made available on VCC Exchange, powered by Bittrex in Vietnam, supporting LRC/BTC trading pair.
• 11/23/2019 — LRC was listed on Pionex, an exchange designed for cryptocurrency trading bots, supporting LRC/BTC and LRC/ETH trading pairs.
• 11/24/2019 — Loopring proposed in the dxDAO to slash 20% of our reputation stake in view of flattening the distribution. It passed.
• 11/26/2019 — Loopring CTO, Steve Guo, delivered a blockchain workshop at Tongji University in Shanghai.

CTO Steve explaining our zkRollup at Tongji.

• 11/26/2019 — We began a small educational thread series about the 6 Loopring zkSNARK circuits.
• 11/29/2019 — Loopring published “DEXes Rising: Next Chapter, High-Performance Orderbook Exchanges on Ethereum.”

TL;DR; DEXes on Ethereum have hit their stride and are showing strong signs of life. Recent growth has mostly been concentrated in on-chain, curve or reserve based DEX models. With advances in layer 2 such as zkRollup, the next cycle will see scalable & secure orderbook DEXes take root on Ethereum, allowing for true non-custodial trading, not just swapping.

• 11/29/2019 — We are thankful that 12 people outside our organization contributed to Loopring’s zkSNARK trusted setup MPC thus far. They are Koh Wei Jie from Ethereum Foundation, Anton Buenavista from Kyber Network, Garrett MacDonald from Tuku, Vany Serezhkin from INSOLAR, Francois Proulx from dfuse, Guo Yu from SECBIT Labs, Felix Leupold from Gnosis, Arnaud Schenk from AZTEC Protocol, Manuel Garcia from Protofire, Chris Wessels from Consensys, James Prestwich from Summa, and Li Weichao from VITE Labs. Their contribution hashes are available here. We are truly grateful for their contribution and pledge to contribute to other projects’ SNARK setup MPC in the future.
• 11/29/2019 — PPIO published Code Talks: Application of Zero-Knowledge Proof Technology in the Blockchain Industry, from a presentation of Loopring CTO, Steve Guo.

• 12/1/2019 — WeDEX has recruited 66 beta testers from the community.

Loopring is a protocol for building high-performance, non-custodial, orderbook-based exchanges on Ethereum. You can sign up for our Bi-Weekly Update, learn more at Loopring.org, or check out:

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