I remember reading “What Is Loopring?” when it was first published by JP Buntinx on The Merkle, back on the 30th of September. Skimming over it, the tone seemed so enthusiastic that I didn’t bother finishing it; I assumed it was one of the publication’s sponsored pieces, and so I closed the tab and went back to staring at the Neo chart and hoping very hard that I’d called the bottom correctly a couple weeks earlier, on China FUD Day 2017 Pt. III.

I’d gone almost entirely into Neo that day, but I still held a tiny amount of other random bags.

One of those bags happened to be Loopring.

I didn’t have what I’d call a “great reason” for owning a Loopring bag at the time: Having been obsessed with reading everything on the Neo subreddit, I’d come across Da Hongfei’s advisory role on the project at some point — the same road that many have taken to Loopring, at this early stage in its story— and I bought a small amount on EtherDelta after the team had requested to be temporarily delisted from Binance.

To be honest, I knew nothing at all about the project; I bought it solely because the token’s value could not have possibly been under worse conditions at that time, and if it had any value at all, then the market had to be undervaluing it.

I called it a “lottery ticket” bag.

Skimming through Buntinx’s “What Is Loopring?” a couple weeks later, I didn’t see any evidence that my lottery ticket was a winner. The truth is, one of my biggest pet peeves in the crypto space is when a project’s whitepaper is filled with diagrams (or doodles) and generic looking equations that try to trick its readers into thinking that it’s perfectly fine that no actual code is being referenced. And, unfortunately, this is what I saw when I clicked on the whitepaper linked in the article.

The project’s promises were — to me — far too ambitious to not have any code included. The disappointing whitepaper, combined with the disappointment that I had for Loopring paying for a sponsored article, resulted in me forgetting about my lottery ticket.

Maybe it’d be worth something in a few years. Probably not, though…