Loopring Monthly Update — 2020/06
We have made good progress in the R&D of the Loopring protocol and Loopring Wallet. Although product iterations can never catch up with the community’s expectations, from a software engineering perspective, this progress is very satisfactory to us. If you want to learn more about Loopring, please read on.
R&D
Loopring Protocol
We decided to do a Loopring 3.6 release before switching gears to Loopring 4.0 (it will have a better name later). Our goal is to make 3.6 good enough for the next two to three years in production to serve our users.
Built on top of Loopring 3.5, Loopring 3.6 will be larger in scope and will provide additional trading functionalities. To name a few:
- Improved onboarding — users won’t need to register an account on the zkRollup before receiving tokens or Ether on Layer-2.
- Multiple transaction types can now be included in the same block — this will greatly increase the block size to reduce both the per-transaction cost and transaction pending time. (no more waiting for only like-requests)
- More flexible deposits, withdrawals, and transfers — users will be able to do cross-account and inter-layer transfers.
- Decreased complexity for block creators
- Decreased costs for some common operations
- Increased token capacity
We will release an updated design doc in July. Loopring 3.6 has almost been fully implemented, but still needs internal audits, more testing, and some implementation refinements. We plan to have the release ready at the end of this month for an external security audit so that we can start using it in production later this year.
Loopring Exchange
We launched a Layer-2 fast transfer feature on Loopring.io with ENS support. This feature is powered by Loopring Pay, a service that is available for all wallets to support Ether and ERC20 token transfers on a zkRollup. The cost per transfer is negligible for us (can be as low as $0.00006 per transfer) and so we charge zero fees currently as a promotion. This has led to an incredibly positive reaction by the Ethereum communities and beyond — especially in this high gas price environment, where even simple transfers are becoming prohibitively expensive. Thank you all so much. We strongly encourage wallets and Ethereum token distribution services to try Loopring Pay.
We also kicked off a Liquidity Mining program which incentivizes users to place resting limit orders on the books, with a dedicated pool of funds per trading pair rewarding users based on predefined rules (described in operations section below). Currently incentivizing ETH-USDT and LRC-USDT liquidity, we’ll keep this program running and will support project teams to start their own liquidity mining campaigns on Loopring.io with their own tokens (we do not charge fees). Contact us if you are interested in improving liquidity for your token, on Ethereum’s zkRollup DEX. Note: in the coming days, we will release an open source ‘Hummingbot Connector’ to allow people to spin up trading bots more easily. This will be a fork from the open source Hummingbot codebase. If you don’t need that, you can plug right in to trade via our API.
We open-sourced the Loopring.io frontend. Loopring.io’s React codebase is now open at https://github.com/Loopring/dexwebapp. Excitingly, as the first third-party merge, the Ren team has added RenBridge to Loopring.io’s UI. Through RenBridge, you can easily mint renBTC by depositing BTC, and then use that renBTC on Loopring or other exchanges on Ethereum. We encourage developers to improve our frontend codebase or add more features!
Loopring also created and funded a Gitcoin bounty for a responsive frontend for Loopring Pay. The winner will earn 25,000 LRC as a reward. Take a look at the bounty if you are interested. The bounty has just ended — we can’t wait to look at the submissions and see what the future of fast, cheap Ethereum-based payments will look like! Importantly, this Loopring Pay UI will be accessible on mobile, something Loopring.io has not been to date.
Loopring Wallet
Solidified published an audit report for Loopring Wallet’s smart contracts (v1.0). There are a few issues identified which we have already fixed.
In the meanwhile, we are inspired by Gas Station Network’s meta-transaction implementation and have improved our module’s design (v1.1). Going forward, we are also open to becoming part of GSN to allow other parties to relay Loopring Wallet meta-transactions. This is currently impossible because we need a very flexible way of reimbursing relayers with any tokens a wallet may actually possess. Loopring Wallet v1.1 is now code-complete and we hope Solidified to audit it once again. Our plan is to release v1.1 in two weeks, before offering the wallet app to a larger group of people.
We have also completed an internal review for our Android codebase. A few improvements are already in place, including the isolation and decoupling of app-level password with wallet owner’s private key management, etc.
Our engineers also enhanced user experience with the automated app and contract upgrade, the automated Layer-2 account registration and account key reset, and the automatic fee token selection for meta-transactions. The app also supports more types of QR code format to offer better inter-wallet interoperability.
The team is busy preparing the launch of the Loopring Wallet app, which represents the core consumer product we will nurture and grow, and hopefully onboard tens of millions of users to Ethereum and DeFi. This will be possible by using our zkRollup scaling to make the experience enjoyable and affordable. Given that we still need to wait for the release of contract v1.1, only a small number of users in our community will be invited to test the first beta. We plan to spend more time in the coming months on polishing the UI.
Loopring Relayer
Many core functionalities in Loopring Exchange and Wallet are enabled by the new and improved APIs provided by our relayer team, especially Loopring Pay, meta-transactions, and liquidity mining.
We have also implemented a long-awaited feature to enable concurrent updates to our Merkle tree. We replayed all historical layer-2 transactions to verify the feature’s correctness, and we will perform further testing to make sure it works as expanded. With this feature, we can update the Merkle tree 10x faster with the same hardware. We plan to deploy this feature into production in July.
In the meanwhile, we have also tested prover service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and further verified the cost is smaller than that on AWS. We are likely to switch to GCP, at least partially, to run our ZKP prover.
Our engineers are also implementing more advanced order types to allow taker-only, maker-only, and stop-limit orders. Hopefully some of these advanced order types will be available in as early as July.
Operations
We are very pleased that Julien Bouteloup joined Loopring Technology Limited as an advisor. Julien has extensive experience trading, and is particularly good at using new market structures and tools. We look forward to Julien's ability and creativity to infuse more value and capability into Loopring Technology.
As mentioned, Loopring held a one-month liquidity mining campaign which began in the middle of this month. It supports 2 trading pairs: LRC/USDT and ETH/USDT, with each pair being rewarded with 3,000 USDT each, shared amongst traders by measuring spread, order depth, and orderbook balance. Users can check their rewards and current ranking on the Loopring Exchange in real time.
We published a Loopring Exchange FAQ, answering the community’s most pressing questions, especially about processing times, costs, and related info.
We reached 2000 users, and then broke 3000 shortly after!
Loopring Exchange has listed new markets pBTC/USDT, COMP/USDT, PNT/USDT, PNK/ETH this month, and has completed more than 1.25 million transactions in total. Loopring Pay now supports 29 tokens, including USDT, USDC, DAI, WBTC, renBTC, pBTC, and some well known DeFi tokens such as KNC, SNX, ZRX and LEND. We’ll continue add more tokens to Loopring Pay, and more trading pairs to Loopring Exchange.
According to DeBank data, Loopring Exchange has settled over 9000 transactions in the past 24 hours, ranking second in the DEX track, behind only Uniswap. And as you can see on DeFi Pulse, the total assets on the Loopring Exchange zkRollup is 7.6 million USD, ranking fourth in the DEX field. (Coincidentally, if you included us in the ‘payment’ section of DeFi Pulse given Loopring Pay, we have the second most assets, just behind Lightning Network, and at one point, actually were number one :).
The HAL team built a LoopringBot on Twitter to report real-time account registrations, deposits, and withdrawals on the Loopring Exchange. They also built a “recipe” allowing users to set notifications to several applications when their Loopring zkRollup withdrawal has been processed.
In The News and On The Ground
- Week in Ethereum
- Bankless Video (Courtesy of DeFi Dad)
- EthHub Weekly (& EthHub Weekly Podcast)
- The Defiant
- Decrypt
- DeFi Italy (Video Interview)
- Zero Knowledge Podcast (about trusted setups)
- Into The Ether Podcast
- The Daily Gwei (and again)
- ETH Network Community Call
- Ethereum CN
- BitcoinBay Virtual DeFi Panel
- POV Crypto Podcast (Video Interview, and Podcast)
- CoinGecko now shows Loopring Exchange data
- Dune Analytics DEX Dashboard now includes Loopring Exchange data
- DeBank added Loopring in their DeFi projects and data
- DeFiMarketCap included us in their DeFi token rankings.
- CoinMarketCap DeFi included us as well.
LRC
LRC has been proposed by a MakerDAO community member to become a collateral asset for DAI.
11.5% of total LRC supply is now staked.
With the strong advancement of the Loopring protocol, the team is assessing how to best adapt LRC staking mechanics to mesh with our layer 2 capabilities, and insert itself in the new functionality/use cases, such as in Loopring Pay.
Binance launched additional LRC trading pairs: LRC/USDT and LRC/BUSD, and Poloniex listed LRC/USD and LRC/BTC trading pairs.
Loopring is a protocol for scalable, secure exchanges and 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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