This month we primarily focused on the contract upgrades and audit of Loopring Smart Wallet 1.1, and the development and testing of Loopring Protocol 3.6. Related research and development are progressing smoothly. Our focus in August is the security audit of protocol 3.6 and the optimization of the mobilewallet app.

R&D

Loopring Protocol

We have completed the development and testing of the core code of Loopring Protocol 3.6. There are still some details that need to be improved and optimized. We believe that we can be ready to conduct a third party security audit in about 1 to 2 weeks. At the same time, we have also started a more formal internal audit process: CEO Daniel Wang, CTO Steve Guo, and Chief Scientist Hoss Ma will lead five other engineers to form an eight-person audit team to conduct detailed audits of the various code modules of the protocol. We estimate that it will take 4 to 6 weeks to complete the internal audit. We also contacted some external audit institutions to seek audit plans and quotations, and we will determine one to engage with in August. As a refresher on some of the v3.6 functionality, see last month’s update.

Loopring Exchange

We launched the referral rewards page on Loopring Exchange. When the amount rewarded from referring friends and receiving rebates on your own trades exceeds $5 USD, rewards will be distributed regularly at the end of each month. If it does not exceed that amount, it rolls over to next month.

https://loopring.io/account/referral-rewards

Six weeks ago we launched liquidity mining on the LRC/USDT and ETH/USDT trading pairs as a first trial, and we had a great response. Liquidity mining campaigns — incentivizing users to place resting limit orders on certain pairs — has improved order depth and spread tightness. We will continue to operate it as a feature of the exchange. After the first phase of the trial, we opened this up to more trading pairs. Currently, you can liquidity mine and be rewarded on four trading pairs: LRC/USDT, USDT/DAI, renBTC/USDT and bZRX/ETH. At the same time, we also released two open source trading bots that can plug in to Loopring Exchange: hummingbot and vnpy . We welcome everyone to come and try mining: add liquidity to Ethereum’s zkRollup DEX and get rewarded.

Liquidity Mining Leaderboard

New pairs listed this past month: renBTC/USDT, BZRX/ETH, LEND/ETH, LEND/USDT, BTU/USDT, GRID/ETH.

Loopring Wallet

After Solidified audited our first version of the wallet contract code last month, we believed that the contract design could be greatly improved, so we immediately re-developed version 1.1. In the new version, we mainly reconstructed the meta-transaction processing module and greatly simplified the design of the business logic module. Just today, Solidified has also completed the audit of version 1.1. No security vulnerabilities were found in the new version. We have shared the audit report on GitHub .

Our backend and app engineers are also docking the new version of the contract. After the docking is completed, the contract and app will be updated at the same time.

Wallet App adds functions such as LRC staking, liquidity mining, transaction flow display, WalletConnect and small asset hiding. At the same time, we are focusing on sorting out the UX interactions of some key processes: such as creating a wallet, asset homepage, Ethereum transfer and Layer 2 account transfer interaction, and the approval process of the guardian. We hired a new designer this month. We believe this will speed up the development and iteration of the wallet, and hope that it will bring you an incredible user experience when launched in beta around September.

At the beginning of the month, we invited the first small batch of community users to try out our first version of the wallet app. We have collected useful feedback and will adapt some good ideas in the new version.

Loopring Relayer

We have launched a few advanced order functions on our relayer, which can now support taker-only and maker-only (‘post-only’) orders. This function is particularly important for market makers, and it is currently available through the market-making API; it will be implemented on the frontend next month and will be provided to ordinary users.

At the same time, we launched the parallel version of our Merkle Tree. After the update, the performance has been improved by almost 10 times, and it can be accelerated by increasing the number of cpu cores. Subsequent clustering will be implemented to achieve horizontal expansion. The coding of the message centre is completed and it is expected to launch next month. The circuit service based on Google Cloud Platform has been developed and can be launched after some tuning. It is expected to reduce the cost while improving the performance of circuit generation of proofs.

Operations

The Loopring Pay UI bounty completed, with two amazing finalists. You can see their work below. Congrats to Federico, winner, and Nicole, runner up.

Excitingly, this winning UI and app has been gifted to the DXdao, and will be hosted permanently by the DXdao as a scalable payment application, Rails. It will live at rails.eth on ENS + IPFS, and should be deployed in the near future. Users will be able to send ETH and ERC20 transfers to anyone else on the Loopring zkRollup, including between Loopring.io and Rails users.

Linq, a digital asset liquidity provider built a Hummingbot connector for Loopring Exchange. This significantly reduces the barrier to entry for MMs, engineers, and trader enthusiasts to deploy a trading bot and strategy on Loopring.io. Anyone can now quickly spin up a bot, and deploy liquidity and their strategy to our orderbooks. The below thread explains why this may meaningfully increase participation on orderbook DEXs. You can see the bot repo here. Linq and Loopring will continue to collaborate around such tools, and liquidity provision on Loopring Exchange.

Speaking of liquidity, during the month we released two new liquidity mining campaigns with great third party sponsors, REN and bZx. You can now automatically be rewarded for providing liquidity (limit orders) to renBTC/USDT, and BZRX/ETH. Both campaigns reward $2k each to users over 30 days. Rewards accrue hourly, are visible on a dashboard, and are paid out at the end of the 30 days.

So far, these programs have really worked to engage the community and increase liquidity on the respective pairs. See below that there was over $100k worth of renBTC deposited on to the Loopring zkRollup after their campaign commenced, and spreads and volume remained attractive.

We also renewed the liquidity mining campaigns for LRC/USDT and created a new one for DAI/USDT. The reward pool is $3k for each of these two pairs, earned hourly over 30 days. In other words, $4.17 to be earned every hour for 1 month on each of these pairs. Read this thread for more info on the current liquidity mining campaigns running, and the ones that were paid out.

The number of accounts on Loopring.io exceeded 4000, and are now above 4200, and the value of assets deposited reached 12 million USD.

http://duneanalytics.com/loopring

And we still have tons of capacity left, with 98.4% of Loopring’s zkRollup blocks being less than half full (<512 tx’s).

https://twitter.com/aliatiia_/status/1284719180818853888?s=20

Loopring participated in the DEX Trader Survey, led by dex.blue. This was a comprehensive survey aimed at getting to the heart of DEX trader behaviour. Results will be summarized shortly. Insightful respondents will win prizes from the 6 participants.

Loopring listed two LEND pairs, LEND/USDT, LEND/ETH, which have quite good depth on the venue.

Loopring listed a GRID/ETH trading pair, with a few extra exciting details. First, new registrants who onboard with code GRID receive 10 GRID in their Loopring layer 2 account. (Cap of 50 code usages). Can also register via this link: https://loopring.io/invite/grid. More excitingly, GridPlus will be looking to integrate GRID redemptions via Loopring Pay so that customers who purchase GRID on the exchange don’t need to incur further costs withdrawing to the base chain when they wish to redeem for energy or Lattice1.

We supported interest earning tokens from Aave (aTokens) and Compound (cTokens) for the first time. Now you can keep productive assets on the Loopring zkRollup and transfer them for free.

In The News and On The Ground

A thorough and thoughtful report on ZK scaling from EthWorks, which looks at this leading scaling technology on Ethereum today. EthWorks analyzes Loopring among the 3 live ZK scaling solutions.

The Bitcoin Podcast where Loopring Business Director Matthew discussed Loopring and zkRollup scaling.

DeFi Dad with another great tutorial on how to escape high gas trading with Loopring.

Vitalik continued to educate and evangelize how zkRollups like Loopring can help alleviate the layer 1 congestion today.

According to TokenInsight, in the first half of 2020, the total transaction volume of decentralized exchanges (DEX) exceeded 6 billion USD, with an increase of 66% in the second quarter vs the first quarter. DEX volume is exploding, and while Loopring still represents a small share of the volume, the number of transactions on the Loopring Exchange ranks second only to Uniswap. This is owed to the high TPS of Loopring, and how it can support many (small value) trades since gas fees are not an issue. Further, DEXs are closing the volume gap vs CEXs, and Loopring is helping bridge the performance gap as well.

https://twitter.com/TokenInsight/status/1278327784163573762?s=20; https://twitter.com/PredictionsExch/status/1280450833910464513?s=20

The Ethereum network continues to gain popularity and usage at rapid pace, and thus is extremely congested. Gas prices have gotten incredibly expensive, even to perform some basic contract interactions, including DEX trades, as seen in the analysis below. This is what Loopring helps alleviate, with trading fees that are mere hundredths or thousandths of its layer 1 peers.

https://twitter.com/SJanuskas/status/1281314087872364544?s=20

Over in Shanghai, the team participated in a few community and media events.

Loopring founder and CEO, Daniel Wang, participated in the BLOCKCAST community telegram group live broadcast. The AMA summary can be viewed in this article. Daniel also participated in an interview with CoinDesk in Chinese. He said the number of DEX users is more important than the depth of transactions.

Steve Guo, Loopring CTO, participated in 3 live broadcasts: ZT CLUB DeFi series; Bitpie AMA; 2020 Fourth Industrial Revolution Cloud DevCon. Steve shared how Loopring helps build a better moat for the Ethereum ecosystem and the application of zkRollup in Loopring Protocol. Jay Zhou, Loopring COO, also participated in 3 live broadcasts: pTokens community; BKEX; and live interview with OKEx CEO Jay Hao. Yu Hongyu, the senior architect of Loopring, was invited in the MXC community, sharing the theme of “The DeFi boom continues, and how Loopring overcomes obstacles”.

Loopring participated in the “Embracing Industry New Wave-2020 Hangzhou Blockchain International Week” hosted by Babbitt. Daniel attended the 2020 Hangzhou Blockchain International Week Panel, talking about the future of DeFi and CeFi, and how Loopring can empower DeFi with Binance and DeBank, and others. Firebird Finance interviewed Daniel to discuss the challenges and directions of blockchain. Daniel also participate in the “DeFi Emergence” seminar held by Babbitt and gave a speech on “Global DeFi Development Path and Loopring Protocol”.

Loopring and Chainlink held a meetup on smart contracts in Hangzhou to share Loopring’s positioning, products and plan for protocol 3.6. Steve Guo participated in the blockchain industry technology seminar held in Shanghai to share Loopring’s leading zkRollup technology.

Loopring established the Loopring Vietnam Community. We will provide technical and financial support for the community, and educate and popularize DeFi products for local users. We believe that Vietnam will be the next important market for the development of cryptocurrency applications.

LRC

There is now 163 million LRC staked. Stakers receive their share of protocol fees paid out to the feeVault.

MakerDAO voting on LRC as collateral commenced two weeks ago, and ends tomorrow. So far, over 93% of MKR votes have been in favour of adding LRC as collateral.

Binance supported isolated margin trading for LRC, and added new trading pairs: LRC/BTC and LRC/USDT, supporting 5 times leverage trading.

The Synthetix community included LRC in their basket of assets in sDEFI, an index token.

Today, August 1st, 2020 is the third birthday of Loopring. A huge and heartfelt thank you to the community for your support over the past three years! They have been amazing, and we are just getting started. We could not have done it without you.

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.

Twitter ⭑ Discord ⭑ Reddit ⭑ Telegram ⭑ GitHub ⭑ Docs ⭑ YouTube