2021 has been a very busy and productive year for Loopring. The start of 2021 ushered in new major product launches from our AMM to our Smart Wallet. Q2 was a quieter quarter on the release front, but we stayed busy applying the lessons learned of the latest releases to get started on a second generation of all our major products. In Q3 we have begun to see the fruits of all this labor as we continue to roll out new major releases all through the second half of 2021 and into 2022.
We believe we are on the precipice of a substantial growth inflection point for Loopring and couldn’t be more excited for what will come in the months ahead.
Summary of Q3
1. Loopring NFT support on L2
Loopring now supports NFT minting, trading, and transfers directly on L2 for both ERC721 and ERC1155 token standards.
L2 zkRollups welcome a new era of possibilities for NFTs that go far beyond jpegs. A fast, cheap, and secure trading environment allows creators and developers to experiment in digital ownership even more so than before, opening up greater opportunities for NFTs to flourish.
This functionality is now the foundation of a new NFT Marketplace that is being built by a partner and set to be launched sometime in Q4.
2. Loopring Exchange — a brand new web experience
The long over-due refresh to the Loopring web experience is finally here.
Our sleek, new UI/UX is now in private beta and ready for selected users for testing. We have many more features to be added to this new web app including a new, full-featured orderbook coming soon.
We really value your feedback! Feel free to join our discord here and submit any feedback to us or just join the conversations with other community members.
3. Counterfactual Loopring Wallet
Our new Counterfactual Wallet is another major step forward on our mission to onboard the masses into crypto.
This try-before-you-buy option will allow users to enjoy the gas-free experience of Ethereum L2 right away, without paying any upfront costs. And when users are ready to withdraw their funds to L1, they can deploy their Ethereum L1 smart contract wallet and pay for the creation costs at that time.
Delaying the wallet creation costs invites a new segment of users who can now experience lightning-quick and cheap transactions right from their pocket, with no admittance fee.
We believe this feature will help onboard many more users to Loopring L2, and with the combination of having other multi-layer deployment options, we have removed many barriers for a broader audience to discover the many security benefits of social recovery wallets.
4. Multi-Layer Smart Wallet
Loopring Smart Wallet is now deployed on Arbitrum, an Optimistic Rollup on Ethereum, with a new user interface coming to the mobile app shortly.
This will allow users to begin deploying their own Loopring wallets with social recovery at near-zero cost, making the security of Social Recovery wallets accessible to all.
Arbitrum deployment is the first step in our Smart Wallet becoming multi-chain. We look forward to integrating these networks into our stack for the best possible experience to serve the needs of our users. We will start rolling out further Smart Wallet deployments in the coming year.
5. Loopring Block Explorer
The Loopring Subgraph is now almost complete which means our much anticipated, fully-featured block explorer is on the way. Loopring users will soon be able to sort through layer-2 blocks, account balances, and exchange and NFT related transactions with ease.
6. Liquidity Mining
Throughout Q3 we have run 4 rounds of liquidity incentive campaigns that covered AMM & orderbook liquidity mining as well as swap and trading tournaments. Our exchange distributed more than 135,000 LRC as campaign rewards, with partners/sponsors also supplying their tokens as incentives.
We have changed our Liquidity mining campaign from two-week to month-long cycles with the addition of weekly payouts. This longer duration format will benefit liquidity providers and traders who wish to plug in their capital for an extended period. Here is round 14 as an example of how they work.
With the launch of our merged liquidity feature, which routes orders to both orderbooks and corresponding AMM pools for the best trading price, our L2 trading tournament now calculates volume as the sum of AMM and orderbook trading.
For token projects or issuers who would like to incentivize liquidity for their token on Loopring L2, we created this request form.
7. Protocol Fees
Currently, as we continue to bootstrap the liquidity and growth of the Loopring Exchange, incentives (protocol fees) are being distributed to help drive this liquidity growth.
We have finished the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh distributions of protocol fees (all paid in LRC) for those who have provided LRC AMM liquidity on our L2. The total amount of LRC distributed in our second and third batches is roughly 200,000. Note that we excluded addresses owned by Loopring from the distribution.
Our LRC tokenomics v2 model rewards LRC holders who use their assets productively for the good of the platform as liquidity providers, insurers, and DAO members.
8. Loopring Media & Milestones
▸ Media + Blogs
Throughout the quarter, Loopring has been featured in many media outlets and other major blogs as layer-2 continue to pick up steam as a critical Ethereum narrative. Below are select examples of media or educational pieces Loopring has been covered in.
- Loopring CTO Steve: “What is the real future of Layer-2 networks”
(transcript of a live event presentation @ Shenzhen Blockchain Week) - Starkware + Loopring present: dAMM (distributed AMM)
▸ Milestones & Misc.
Q3 came with impressive milestones, the most notable being surpassing $2B traded on Loopring v3.6 exchange. We also hit another big milestone as we passed 2.5M transactions processed on Loopring L2.
A new L2 info site was also created in Q3, which really showcases the cost advantage Loopring L2 has as an application-specific zkRollup. You can read more about this here or visit the site to see direct comparisons here.
Loopring (LRC) was also listed on Kraken and on Abra in Q3.
Path Forward
1. NFT Marketplace
As mentioned above, we are working with an established partner who is building atop our newly released L2 NFT functionality. We are very excited to share more on this as soon as we can. This new marketplace is set to launch sometime prior to the end of 2021(Q4).
2. zkEVM
In Q3, we began working with the Ethereum Foundation on a zkEVM solution.
It is still in the early stages, but we strongly believe the future of Ethereum layer-2 scaling belongs on a generalizable EVM-compatible or EVM equivalent zkRollup. You can read more about the zkEVM and how it compares to other layer-2 solutions here.
We will continue to update the community on this as it progresses through Q4 and into 2022.
3. dAMM: Distributed AMMs (in collaboration w/ Starkware)
In Q3 we announced a brand new mechanism called “dAMM”, a Distributed AMM model, that we are working on with Starkware.
The dAMM model will help solve the liquidity fragmentation problem across multiple L2s by creating shared liquidity pools on Ethereum L1 that can be used to asynchronously share liquidity — exposing LPs to more trades.
You can read more on this project here. We will share more updates on this as it progresses.
4. More Multi-Layer Wallets + Further Mobile Upgrades:
As mentioned in the Q3 Summary, the addition of the Arbitrum layer inside the Loopring Smart Wallet is only the beginning of the new mobile experience.
Next deployments are likely to include Optimism and Binance Smart Chain, but we are also researching many other options to bring the Loopring Smart Wallet with social recovery to many more users.
5. Further Exchange Improvements
With the release of the public beta version of the new web app, we are now focused on user feedback to tweak and improve this experience.
On top of this, we also have a few more improvements and features to be added to the web app including a new Orderbook experience and more.
Questions & Feedback
If you’d like to talk to us for partnership, have questions, and/or feedback, please join our Discord, or drop us a line at foundation@loopring.org. We also have an active Reddit community.
About Loopring
Loopring is an Ethereum zkRollup protocol for scalable, secure exchanges & payments. Loopring builds non-custodial, high-performance products atop our layer-2, including the Loopring Wallet — a mobile Ethereum smart wallet, and the Loopring Exchange — an L2 orderbook and AMM DEX. To learn more, you can sign up for our Quarterly Update or see Loopring.org.
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