Loopring, Crypto & DWeb Meetup, and Digital Privacy Montreal jointly held the DEXploration meetup to discuss decentralized exchange, and the Loopring Protocol.

The crowd consisted of knowledgeable DEXperts and rookies alike, showing the broad appeal for decentralized exchange and non-custodial trading.

While building a DEX protocol day in/day out and dealing with technical issues large and small, it’s easy to lose track that the whole ecosystem is building this for (hopefully) a large and diverse set of users. It’s always super helpful to see what people actually care about in terms of trading and general crypto value exchange.

Matthew from Loopring

Unsurprisingly, not needing to trust anyone with your assets at any point during the trading process seemed to be the most obvious and widely-believed benefit. Global liquidity (one day) and new business models were, for now, distant runner-ups. The hope that pseudonymous trading will remain feasible is also still alive and well. Many users are also glad for the arrival of trustworthy and robust stablecoins, allowing for easier trading/hedging and short term store of value.

As for drawbacks, the biggest hurdles were expressed as only being able to trade assets native to a single chain, such as ERC20s on Ethereum, and the current lack of liquidity on DEXs. Solvable problems, we think, especially with interoperability solutions making good progress, and the tokenization of assets from one chain to the other, like wrapped bitcoin. Of course, the general complexity of using blockchain-based products remains a familiar foe.

Given that part of the attendees consisted of Digital Privacy Montreal, we want to respect the ethos :).

The team at Dolomite gave a livestream presentation of their Loopring-based platform, Dolomite.io. Set to launch in a couple weeks, the sleek DEX gave a glimpse of their exchange functionality and crypto portfolio management tools.

On the exchange side, streamlined design and abstracting away the complicated bits is a nice change of pace vs current DEX offerings. Lending to this are subtle design decisions such as letting shading/colours tell the story vs verbose descriptions. Most impressive for a general audience may be the ability to completely switch denominations of every bit of info — pricing, assets, history — into USD, not ETH.

Dolomite DEX

As for their portfolio view, the ability to track any Ethereum address’ token balance/performance on a minute by minute granularity was very notable. Their market data is comprehensive, allowing a user to go back and see the USD or ETH value of a single trade or transaction they made 1 or 2 years ago.

Also of note was their regulation and compliance strategy, working with leading partners for KYC/AML, and being licensed to operate in over 30 states. Thanks Corey Caplan and team.

Finally, we also tested UP Wallet mobile Wallexes built on Loopring. Specifically, we used the P2P (non-orderbook) trading features. It’s truly empowering to be able to trade P2P with someone, completely trustlessly.

Anyone who downloaded the mobile UP Wallet for iOS or Android was able to scan a QR code and take an order. It’s also always nice to be able to provide a bit of extra incentive, such as offering a trade at a better-than-market rate :).

This order sells LRC for WETH at a rate of 1 LRC = 0.00037 ETH. This is a live order anyone can scan and take.

Thanks for everyone who showed up. We learned a lot, and hope you did too. We’re as excited as ever to keep building Loopring Protocol. Keep an eye out for Loopring 2.0, audits to be complete within the next couple of weeks.