PlasmaChain will become Basechain.

Now that I have your attention…

We are preparing for the largest upgrade to our mainnet ever, and we feel this is the best time to announce its new name — to reflect these major changes and to evoke the essence of the chain’s existence.

When we started Loom, it was born from our personal pain points developing dapps for Ethereum — the transactions were costly, execution and confirmations were slow, and the onboarding experience had much to be desired.

So we wrote down what we wanted: a way to make Ethereum smart contracts 10x faster, 10x cheaper, and at the same time, easier to onboard new users. Coming from a Silicon Valley background, we wanted to make practical and pragmatic choices about the technology, thus we chose Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Plasma Cash. Both of these could be implemented within a year, and were likely to be performant.

Fast forward two years to 2019, and we have achieved what we set out to build: transactions on Loom are gas-free, 10x faster than Ethereum mainnet, and you can onboard users via a variety of wallets, providers, and methods — most them completely seamless to the end user. When we sat down again to make a plan for the next two to five years, it was obvious that faster and cheaper would simply not be enough.

The Changing Space

Looking closely at the blockchain industry, it seems that many people are still stuck with ideas from 2017. They may have new names and new guises for them, but they all boil down to the same old concepts. Meanwhile, the industry has been changing dramatically. We already have fascinating smart contract-less chains dedicated to moving tokens around with Binance Chain and Libra, we have a plethora of stablecoins becoming the preferred tokens for payments, and quietly behind the scenes are the enterprise blockchains being adopted by the established institutions.

People are innovating blockchain tech faster and faster these days, and with all these shifting trends around us, it becomes increasingly difficult for developers to figure out what to do.

Do I build on Ethereum or another platform?

Which token should I accept as payment?

Should I wait for Facebook and build a dapp on Libra?

These are some of the questions we hear when reaching out to individual developers, and they are the exact pain points we identify with.

At Loom Network, we are developers first and foremost — from all the tooling we build, to the trading card game Relentless, and to the free code school CryptoZombies.io, the most popular blockchain school around. In fact, we’re not just developers of blockchain infrastructure; we’re also one of the biggest developers of dapps in general.

So what we would like to do over the next couple years is build a home base for you.

Deploy Once, Get Multichain Support

No matter what new trending chain emerges, we will be interoperable. If there are awesome new wallets or tooling that come out, we will be compatible. Rest assured, when something new comes along, you won’t have to redo all your hard work just so that your dapp is able to talk to it. We’ll be doing all that work for you.

Our goal is for you to deploy your dapp only ONCE to Loom Basechain, and have it automatically get connected to every major blockchain using any kind of wallet — which also means getting exposed to the user base of all these chains combined.

That doesn’t mean we’re merely going to connect to a bunch of chains and call it a day… Our plan is to actively support new blockchain use cases as they emerge. We will continue to scale our capabilities not just in the simple dimensions of speed and cost, but also so that new use cases can get native-level support. Moreover, we are committed to vastly expanding our CryptoZombies code school so you can stay up to date on the latest tech, whatever it may be.

Bringing it on Home

Therefore, in moving beyond a Plasma focus and toward an interconnected multichain platform with Loom Network as the central hub… the main station… the home base — PlasmaChain becomes Basechain.

Whether you are building a dapp or a special purpose chain, we want Loom Basechain to be the tool that makes it easy for you to connect to the larger and ever-evolving blockchain ecosystem.