This is the fourth and final edition of our 2022 Loopring Quarterly Updates. You can catch up on the previous quarter here; you can also receive these updates in your inbox every quarter by subscribing here.
While the overall crypto market has been going through a deep bear trend filled with plenty of drama, we’ve remained optimistic and steadfast on our goal: to build a platform that enables the world to become their own bank.
Despite the bear market, we’ve seen an explosion of NFT activity on L2. The emergence of counterfactual NFTs, improved developer experience, and additional marketplaces, has set the stage for a promising future for web3 on Loopring.
This strong foundation is also well-suited for the development of gaming and financial applications. We are very excited by some of these possibilities and are actively looking at expanding on them over 2023.
This past fourth quarter was highlighted by even more Loopring L2 account growth, further expansion of our new DeFi Port framework and the announcement of LRC Staking officially coming to users on Layer 2.
Here are a few notable accomplishments in Q4:
Major Milestones in Q4/2022 🔥
- Over $5.6billion in total trading volume
- Almost 200K L2 accounts now created
- 43K+ total Smart Wallets deployed
Summary of Q4
1. L2 DeFi Port expansion
Loopring took a huge step forward in 2022 with the launch of Loopring Earn, which was made possible by our new L2 DeFi Port mechanism. To learn more about the technical aspects of L2 DeFi Port, you can check out these blogs, written by our CEO Steve Guo, here and here.
In Q4 we added Bitcoin, in the form of wrapped BTC, to the Dual Investment Earn option. We also passed a major DAO vote to have LRC Staking added to Loopring Earn.
On top of all of this, another powerful new LSD (liquid staking derivative) has also been added as a staking option, in the form of rETH.
rETH is a fully decentralized way to stake your ETH and earn rewards, from the team at Rocket Pool, which can now be accessed directly on Loopring L2! Learn more about rETH and the Rocket Pool project here.
We have exciting plans for introducing more DeFi features to Loopring users in the future, potentially including: lending, margin trading, leveraged ETH earn products, and more. Keep an eye out for updates in 2023!
2. Loopring DAO: Phase 2
The second phase of the Loopring DAO kicked off in the fourth quarter!
In Phase 2 we are enhancing the transparency and community autonomy as well as proposing new tokenomics, aimed at boosting LRC utility + enhancing the incentives for users to take part in the Loopring L2 ecosystem.
We will continue to expand the DAO, with the help of feedback from the community, until we achieve our ultimate goal of completely decentralizing the Loopring L2 ecosystem!
3. More ways to earn Loopheads!
This past quarter we launched a new ambassadors + builders initiative, aimed at rewarding all types of contributors to the Loopring L2 ecosystem!
Last year we launched the Loopring Community Creator Grants. This initiative gave recognition to the special builders in our community by giving them the title of “Looping Legend” in our Discord as well as awarding them with a small grant and a Loophead NFT.
The success of this program prompted us to extend recognition to more builders and establish a new role for educators and content creators who promote Loopring and increase the adoption of L2 technology. Therefore, we are now expanding the ‘Legend’ role and introducing the new ‘L2 Looper’ role for Loopring ambassadors who educate others and raise awareness and adoption of Loopring through their marketing efforts.
This will be an ongoing program, with monthly new recipients who will receive the new role within the community as well as a Loophead NFT!
You can read more about the new initiative in our blog here.
4. Decentralizing Dual Investment on L2
In Q4, our CEO Steve Guo put out a new technical blog detailing all of the inner workings of the new tech behind our popular Dual Investment product on Loopring L2.
If you haven’t heard of Dual Investment yet, it is one of the most popular products across Centralized crypto exchanges. And now it can be accessed on Loopring L2, without sacrificing the control of your assets.
If you are interested in learning more about how to use the new product, you can also check out our full guide here.
5. Loopring L2 + Wallet Upgrades
We added a number of new upgrades + features throughout the Loopring L2 ecosystem this quarter. Check out some of the main highlights below👇
NFT Upgrades:
- “View by Collection” has been added to allow for easier categorization of NFTs by collection
- Importing collection information now supported for legacy NFT w/o collection_metadata, so that all NFTs minted in Loopring can contain proper collection information
- NFT favorites — this new feature allows users to set their favorite NFTs and hide unwanted ones
- Fixes — we fixed the issue of special characters not displaying correctly in NFT descriptions
Earn upgrades:
- Beginner mode now implemented for dual investment portfolio to provide newcomers with a better experience
- UI Optimizations for the Earn page and Dual Investment products to allow easier navigation w/ enhanced visuals
- UI Optimizations for the AMM to indicate daily earning
Generic improvements:
- Dark mode is now supported in the Loopring Wallet on mobile
- Multi-language support was introduced in App w/ more languages being added in 2023
- Wallet Connect 2.0 is supported in Wallet App
- Loopring Guardians page is optimized for easy usage
- UI Optimizations for send + other failure handlings
As always, we will continue to gather feedback from the community as well as work with our partners to add new features, tools, and improve the usability of Loopring L2 so that users can truly move closer to becoming their own bank.
6. Cloud Backup + Recovery now on Loopring Wallet
No more paying to recover your wallet — Cloud Backup is here!
Another big upgrade came to the Loopring Smart Wallet in Q4. Instead of using your guardians to recover your wallet, which incurs an on-chain transaction fee, you can now encrypt and store your keys in the cloud for free instead, which can then be easily recovered later.
You can learn exactly how to back-up your wallet to the cloud — making your wallet recoverable in the future for free — with our new video guide here!
7. Bringing more LRC Utility to L2
You can now pay fees on Loopring L2 with LRC and receive 20% off!
This is another step forward in bringing more utility to LRC and to tie it into becoming the underlying core of a completely decentralized Loopring L2 ecosystem in the future.
8. Token Gated Communities now live on L2
The Collab Land + Loopring integration has taken a step forward this quarter, as token-gated roles directly on L2 are now live within our Discord community!
This new tool gives creators endless potential to strengthen their communities within the Loopring ecosystem. It also allows us to set up special roles within our community to better reward participants. If you haven’t already, hop into our Discord and verify your Loophead in your L2 wallet to receive a special “Loophead” role in the community!
While we have yet to tap into the full potential and numerous other use-cases that this opens up for communities on Loopring L2, certain features are currently ready to use. Read this guide to create your own token-granted roles for your community. Keep an eye as more features will be added in the future.
9. Koinly Makes Taxes a Breeze on L2
We are excited to announce that we have partnered with Koinly to make it easy for you to calculate taxes on your Loopring L2 activity. No need to stress about creating complex spreadsheets or manually altering transactions — just enter your address and let Koinly do the rest. Check out the Ultimate Tax Guide for a stress-free tax season.
10. Protocol Fees for Q4
Loopring distributed 150,377.1 LRC in protocol fees this quarter.
These fees are given to liquidity providers, insurers, future liquidity mining campaigns, and the DAO as a reward for their efforts in strengthening the protocol. As voted by LRC holders and LPs when LRC staking is implemented, protocol distributions will be allocated as follows: 45% to eligible liquidity providers in AMM pools, 45% to LRC stakers, and 10% to the Loopring DAO.
Here are the AMM pools voted by the community that will be rewarded for Q1 2023:
⭐️ LRC/ETH
⭐️ LRC/USDC
⭐️ LRC/USDT
⭐️ LDO/ETH
⭐️ ETH/USDC
⭐️ IMX/USDC
Loopring in the Media ☆
Catch some of Loopring’s media and blog coverage highlighting Ethereum Layer 2’s growing significance.
HackerNoon coverage of Loopring:
“Which Layer 2 Solutions Are Helping Ethereum Scale?”
https://hackernoon.com/how-are-layer-2-solutions-helping-ethereum-scale
CoinGecko coverage of Loopring:
“What are Layer 2s and why are they important?”
https://www.coingecko.com/learn/what-are-layer-2-crypto-protocols?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
CoinDesk coverage of Loopring:
“GameStop NFT Marketplace: A Beginner’s Guide”
https://www.coindesk.com/web3/gamestop-nft-marketplace-a-beginners-guide/
Path Forward 💙
1. LRC Staking is coming to Loopring L2
It’s official! LRC Staking is coming to Loopring L2.
Thanks to the amazing turn out of the community, the 10M LRC quorum was easily reached and the vote was passed, which means LRC Staking will soon be available directly on L2.
Look out for an update on this soon in Q1 2023. Users will be able to easily stake their LRC from their Loopring Smart Wallets or by connecting their other wallets to Loopring.io web app, using the LRC in your L2 account.
Stay tuned!
2. More coming to Loopring Earn
Loopring Earn has brought users a new and simple approach to earning extra yield easily directly on Loopring L2. So far, we’ve brought you ETH Staking and Dual Investment options, but this is just the beginning.
In 2023, we are looking to add even more DeFi functionality to users, with the introduction of automatic trading bots, LRC staking, and new features that will make Lending and Borrowing possible.
Hop onto our Discord or Reddit and send us your feedback to let us know what other top features you want to see on Loopring Earn!
3. Liquidity + trade depth improvements
It’s no secret that some of the token pairs don’t perform well in our L2 DEX due to lack of AMM liquidity. For large volume swaps, it will invoke non-trivial price impacts, which is not a good experience for users, especially users coming from Centralized competitors who are used to very low slippage and cheap execution.
Thanks to our new DeFi Port solution, we are now working on new, innovative ways to introduce liquidity from other channels to our L2 users on the Loopring DEX in order to resolve this issue. Stay tuned for more updates on this!
4. Multi-wallet + Multi-chain support
We plan to allow users to create multiple smart wallets in the Loopring Wallet app and to expand support to additional networks beyond Ethereum.
Loopring Smart Wallet is a leading smart wallet within the Ethereum ecosystem, with many unique features that drastically improve user security, like social recovery, giving users full control of their financial futures.
There is a reason why leaders in the space like Vitalik Buterin believe that we need the wide adoption of social recovery wallets. We believe this product needs to be expanded to all users across all networks one day, and we are now confident in the Smart Wallet we offer to start introducing it to many more users!
5. Upcoming Loopheads Challenges
In Q4 we outlined a new initiative for the community to earn Loopheads on an ongoing basis. You can read more about that initiative here.
In Q1 2023, we will also be launching a new DeFi challenge in parallel. The details of this next competition are being finalized, but you can expect shorter burst challenges to help incentivize the release of some of our newer Loopring Earn products.
Stay posted to our socials for more information!
6. NFT Red Packets💌
Another exciting new feature coming to Loopring L2 in the coming months is NFT Red Packets.
Our popular Red Packets that have been the framework for many popular scavenger hunts and games on Loopring, will now be expanding to NFTs. Users will be able to fill special packets with NFTs and send them out randomly to other L2 users using special parameters set by the sender.
These features will also be rolling out to Loopring.io users, so that all L2 users (not just smart wallet users) will be able to experience the fun of Red Packets.
This functionality opens the door to all sorts of new experimentation and games on Loopring L2, making Pokemon-Go-like games possible using the power of fast and cheap NFTs on Ethereum’s second layer.
⭐️ Community Initiatives + Events ⭐️
We have such an amazing and growing community with so much happening that we want to continue to share some of the cool things going on in this new regular piece as part of the quarterly reports.
Here are some recent + upcoming community initiatives and events👇
Note: Loopring does not directly endorse the use of any third-party applications as we have not been able to independently verify the code, so please exercise caution and use at your own risk.
LoopExchange
The longest running NFT Marketplace built on Loopring L2 — you can buy, sell and collect NFTs on LoopExchange. It’s a marketplace for all Loopring Layer 2 creators and collectors alike!
Check out the marketplace for yourself here, or follow along on their twitter for constant updates.
Big shoutout to the creator of LoopExchange, leppaludi.eth, who has been a long-time supporter and builder on Loopring L2 and has recently become a Loopring Legend. You can follow him on twitter as well here.
#PowerToTheCommunity💙
Maize
If you need to monitor an NFT collection or perform an airdrop then look no further. Maize is your one-stop shop for providing analytics and mass transferring NFTs and crypto on Loopring L2.
Check out the new community built tool for yourself here, or follow the creator of Maize, cobmin, on his twitter for ongoing updates.
Eureka Game
In Q4, we announced an official partnership with Eureka to help them integrate their new game into the Loopring ecosystem.
Eureka is a vast multiplayer strategy game of 19th-century commerce and exploration, played in real-time on a shared single map of the continent, using Loopring L2
Check out their website or follow along on their twitter to catch the release of this game into the Loopring ecosystem!
Want to get into the next Community section?
Get into our Discord server and post your community events into the #community-initiatives channel or make some noise on Twitter and we will follow along and pick out some of the coolest things happening on Loopring L2 and post them in each new addition of our quarterly reports!
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.
About Loopring
Loopring is an Ethereum Layer 2 zkRollup protocol for scalable, secure DeFi and NFT applications. 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, follow us on Medium or see Loopring.org.