This is the fourth and final edition of our 2021 Loopring Quarterly Updates. You can catch up on the previous quarter here and you can also receive these updates in your inbox every quarter by subscribing here.
2021 was the year we saw Layer 2’s step into the mainstream as total value locked grew from $40 million to $5.55 billion. As many L2 projects launched and were met with high demand, rollups quickly proved to be more than just a necessity to escape rising gas prices. They widened Ethereum’s canvas by allowing a range of new transactions not previously possible on Layer 1.
For Loopring, this past year saw a huge influx of users, from newcomers and those native to Ethereum. The Ethereum natives, who were priced out of L1, quickly discovered the many benefits of gas-free transactions, while a larger subset of new crypto converts skipped L1 altogether, directly adopting L2. The Loopring community can celebrate a few of these notable accomplishments:
Major Milestones in 2021
- New all-time-high Daily Trading Volume: $142 million
- $4 billion in total traded volume on Loopring L2
- All-time-high Total Value Locked (TVL) on Loopring L2: $750 million
- Rapid social growth in Q4 (2021):
* + 75,000 new followers on Reddit
* + 100,000 new followers on Twitter
* + 20,000 new Discord community members - Over $500 million traded during our year-end 7 day Holiday Trading Tournament
Throughout 2021, we’ve continued to operate and innovate across the stack (improving many aspects of the rollup experience) however we’ve increasingly narrowed our focus on the top, releasing major new products and features specific to mass adoption. New product launches included our Loopring Smart Wallet with social recovery and a brand new web app experience for Loopring L2. On the protocol side, we added NFT support and upgraded our AMM, helping Loopring’s overall growth.
Adoption will be the major theme for 2022. We expect our zkRollup technology to take a massive leap, adding further generalizability to Loopring. Put on your seat belts and stay Ethereum-level secure, 2022 is shaping up to be another wild ride of low fees, high speeds and plenty more growth!
Summary of Q4
1. Counterfactual Loopring Wallet with New UI/UX
Our brand new (Layer 2) Counterfactual Smart Wallet is finally here.
This highly anticipated release allows users to try out our Smart Wallet with full L2 functionality at zero-cost to activate. The zero-cost gives users a try-before-you-buy experience on Loopring L2 before deciding to upgrade to the full (L1 +L2) Smart Wallet at a later time.
You can read more about the new wallet here. It is available across app stores on iOS + Android and users will be delighted by the new and improved UI/UX design. Beyond the interface, the most exciting feature is a direct-to-Loopring L2 fiat on-ramp that facilitates a seamless onboarding experience to Layer 2. This allows anyone to access Layer 2 directly from their smartphone for little to no cost. We still have a ways to go but are working hard on rolling out new features and updates to make onboarding even easier. We really value the community’s input and encourage you to join our discord here to share your ideas or feedback!
2. Direct-to-Loopring L2 fiat on-ramps
We want to make it as easy and as cheap as possible for users to onboard onto our zkRollup.
In Q4 we released our first direct fiat on-ramp which removed a massive barrier to Loopring adoption. Users can now hop on (and soon hop off!) Loopring with FIAT while avoiding the prohibitive gas fees of L1.
In 2022 we will continue to push forward with more direct bridges. Our eyes are set on Centralized exchange (CEX) bridges, as well as more fiat regional coverage and other L2s next.
3. Liquidity Mining
We finished off the year with a bang! We held our biggest ever Liquidity Mining / Trading Tournament event with over $600K in token giveaways, over a mere 7-day period.
Here are some of the major highlights from the event:
- New all-time-high Daily Trading Volume: $142 million
- Over $500 million traded on Loopring L2 during the 7 day period
- Over 300K transactions took place on Loopring L2 as well during the event
- Over 12K new wallets were downloaded throughout the 7 days
4. Loopring Exchange — an upgraded web experience
Our new exchange got a few upgrades and improvements including a brand new orderbook web experience, and the introduction of our new VIP tiers, created to incentivize more liquidity on Loopring L2.
Our sleek, new UI/UX is now in public beta and available to all users. You can now get a seamless CEX (centralized exchange) experience, with most of the tools and features you’d expect, without having to trust a third party with the custody of your funds.
Enjoy fast and cheap orderbook trading directly on our Loopring L2 self-custodial web experience here!
A new VIP structure was also introduced in Q4 to help better integrate and align the LRC token into the core of our products. Now you can get discounts on your trading just by holding LRC as well as the standard volume requirements. You can read more about the new Loopring VIP Tiers here.
5. Loopring University
Our Loopring University content series has launched across multiple platforms to help educate new users who are just getting into the Loopring ecosystem or crypto in general.
You can now find educational Loopring University content across Discord channels, on YouTube, and on Reddit pages here and here.
Without a doubt, Ethereum and Layer 2 has a steep learning curve and we hope to simplify things by providing accessible educational video and written content to everyone.
6. Loopring Support Desk
We are very pleased to have also rolled out our new support desk this quarter, along with more beefed up full-time support with the addition of a new dedicated team member, Ben(odesium), who is helping to scale our support desk in anticipation of a busy year in 2022.
You can now browse through our knowledge base here, which is full of support articles and guides, as well as submit a ticket to get prompt technical support on all of our products.
7. Protocol Fees
Loopring broke many records in Q4, but none were more impressive than generating an all-time high of $300,000 in protocol fees. Users have been able to earn these fees on Layer-2 by contributing productively for the good of the protocol (LPing and coming soon, voting and insuring). As Layer-2s continue to heat up in 2022, we expect our protocol fees to keep on climbing.
8. Loopring Media & Milestones
Throughout the quarter, Loopring has been featured in many media outlets and other major blogs as Layer 2’s continue to pick up steam as a critical Ethereum narrative. Below are select examples of media or educational pieces Loopring has been covered in.
CoinDesk coverage of Loopring:
What Is Loopring and What’s Driving Its Rise?
You would not be alone. While Ethereum’s 2.0 upgrade might seem like a long way from being completed, there is help at…
www.coindesk.com
Bloomberg coverage of Loopring:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-03/how-new-blockchain-tech-aims-to-ease-ethereum-s-growing-pains
Counterfactual Wallet coverage on the Daily Gwei:
Path Forward for 2022
1. Loopheads NFT airdrop for early adopters
We are very pleased and excited to officially announce our new Loophead NFTs — loopheads.info
Introducing a new dynamic design that will bring your NFT to life. Collect yours and watch how they change over time ;)
This exclusive 10,000 NFT collection will be airdropped and distributed to our users (in special 1,000 pack drops) throughout 2022, beginning immediately this month.
Our intention is to distribute these to as many Loopring L2 users as possible, so even if you cannot get in on this first 1,000 pack, no need to worry, every 1,000 pack will be distributed in a different way to get these in as many early user’s wallets as possible throughout 2022!
Read more about the drops here.
2. Loopring HQ launching in the Metaverse
The Metaverse is starting to become another big theme for 2022 as many top technology companies and decentralized projects are laying the infrastructure for potentially many different versions of the Metaverse.
Wherever the future of the Metaverse ends up, it is NFTs that will make them all interconnected. Many exciting things are planned for 2022, and we are kicking things off by launching our first Headquarters (HQ) in Decentraland, a decentralized Metaverse built on top of Ethereum.
This is only the start of Loopring’s plans to plant flags around the Metaverse, where we will host meetup events, launch play-to-earn games, host AMAs, concerts and many more things throughout 2022 and beyond.
The Metaverse creates the new digital world we will all live in one day, and NFTs enable the infrastructure to make the new world interoperable and own-able for the masses.
3. Counterfactual NFTs now on Loopring L2
We are also excited to introduce a new NFT design on Loopring L2, Counterfactual NFTs.
With Counterfactual NFTs, each Loopring user can mint NFTs to an NFT contract fully owned by him/her with no additional cost. The NFTs minted for these kinds of contracts are fully usable on L2. Only when somebody wants to withdraw the NFT to L1 does the NFT contract need to be deployed to L1 as well, which is something that can be done by anyone at any time. This means that the minter of the NFTs truly is fully in control of his/her NFTs at all times, which is not always the case with other methods that aim to provide the same low cost.
4. More direct-to-Loopring L2 integrations
In Q4, we launched our first direct-to-Loopring L2 bridge with the integration of Ramp fiat on-ramps. This gives users the ability to bypass the prohibitive gas fees on Ethereum L1 and onboard funds directly to Loopring L2 using our web or mobile app.
In 2022 we will be launching many more direct bridges to our L2. For starters, we’ll include more regional coverage for fiat on-ramps (and off-ramps coming soon). We’ll also launch direct centralized exchange bridges, giving users the ability to move funds quickly and cheaply from popular CEXs directly to their Loopring L2 wallets.
Stay tuned for further announcements.
5. Multi-Layer Wallets
As mentioned in the Q3 Summary, the addition of the Arbitrum layer inside the Loopring Smart Wallet is almost now complete and another step forward in the new mobile experience.
Next deployments are likely to include Optimism and Arbitrum, but we are also researching other options to bring our social recovery wallet to more users.
6. Loopring DAO
This year we plan to initialize the Loopring DAO through on-chain voting, which will become an integral component of our v2 tokenomics.
Although voting will take place on Snapshot.org on L1, there will be no need to withdraw back to L1 and incur fees just to vote. By using the Loopring subgraph we’ll be able to capture L2 balances from our own rollup, giving LRC holders on L2 the ability to vote on the protocol fee distribution awarded to participants. We’re very excited to see the first DAO for a zkRollup protocol take shape.
7. Further Exchange Improvements
More improvements are coming to our new web app throughout 2022. Look out for new improvements and features such as L2 NFT display functionality, a more professional trading page, DAO snapshot voting, and more!
We even have an ambitious plan to create a basket of solutions for Layer 2 NFTs, from end to system to be used out of the box, where ecological partners only need to simply customize the UI.
Questions & Feedback
If you’d like to talk to us about any partnerships, 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 for anyone to join in.
About Loopring
Loopring is an Ethereum Layer 2 zkRollup protocol for scalable, secure exchanges & payments. Loopring builds non-custodial, high-performance products atop our L2, including the Loopring Wallet — a mobile Ethereum smart wallet, and the Loopring L2 web app — an L2 orderbook and AMM DEX. To learn more, you can sign up for our Quarterly Update or see Loopring.org.