In mid-March, Loom Network officially went live, with the launch of DelegateCall — the first DApp running 100% on a Loom Network DAppChain.

This is big news for the Ethereum community: It’s one of the first examples of a highly scalable and performant DApp running on a sidechain backed by Ethereum, and even Vitalik took notice. (We’re now in very early exploratory talks with the Plasma team about the possibility of incorporating Plasma into Loom DAppChains).

We announced a beta application for developers to test the Loom SDK, and have been amazed by the response — we’ve received a wave of applications from developers working on really interesting DApps that simply aren’t possible with the current infrastructure due to scaling limitations.

Today with the Alpha release of the Loom SDK, we’re starting to give the very first of these developers access to start building on Loom Network.

Update for developers who have applied

For those who have applied and haven’t heard from us yet, take a deep breath, we are just starting to open up the beta now.

Currently we have 5 internal projects at Loom (see below for details). We also have allowed 4 external parties to join our beta.

Over the next 2 weeks we plan to open up to more projects, with an initial focus on projects focused around games and social apps, and we will continue to slowly trickle in more teams over time.

Timeline

Apr: 0.5 release, adding more users to the Golang SDK

0.5 release, adding more users to the Golang SDK May: 0.8 release of Solidity support, and opening beta up to more people

0.8 release of Solidity support, and opening beta up to more people June: 1.0 public beta release — the SDK will be opened up for all developers to use

Cost to developers

There are no ongoing fees — developers simply need to own enough Loom tokens to cover their usage tier. Buy once, use forever.

We have explained in more detail how the Loom Token will work for developers in this post:

Internal Projects

1. CryptoZombies.io — Interactive Solidity Code School

The famous CryptoZombies code school that has had over 150k users is being converted to a DAppChain. We are super excited as it means on day 1, it will be one of the largest sidechains in the blockchain world.

2. The Adventures of EtherBoy in Blockchain World

A side-scrolling action game that stores its state on a DAppChain. It allows items, achievements, and other rewards to be transferred off the DAppChain onto Ethereum mainnet.

3. DelegateCall.com

Needs no introduction, but the first Question-and-Answer site on the blockchain. Learn more about it how DelegateCall uses DAppChains.

Delegatecall was the first proving ground for DAppChains. It has now processed over 18,000 blocks and is still running strong.

We’ll be continuing to make further improvements over the coming weeks, stay tuned for updates.

4. CryptoZombies Battlegrounds

Hearthstone-style Collectible card game, with purchasable decks. Should be fun to see a PvP game on a blockchain.

Cards are provably rare and can be traded freely on the blockchain as non-fungible tokens. Lots of interesting challenges in building this, we will post in upcoming blog posts.

5. CryptoZombies Rancher

Pokemon style battle game, where you can grow, clone and mutate your zombies to give them powers to beat other players. With all battles on DAppChains, and cross chain transfers with Ethereum, this is an exciting project.

Features of the Loom SDK

We’ll be slowly releasing more and more details and documentation around the SDK in the coming months, but here is a top-level overview:

Blockchain Features

Tokens — ERC20 compatible

Tokens — ERC721 Non-fungible compatible (Think CryptoKitties)

pBFT Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

DPoS Delegated Proof of Stake

Transactional DataStore

Protobuf support

Migration Framework

Hard Fork Manager

Golang Smart Contract support (Solidity coming soon, see below)

Unity client SDK (.NET)

Javascript client SDK

InterBlockchain Communication, see below

Cross-Blockchain Features

Ethereum Connectivity

Coin copying and transfering between chains

Allow assets like ERC721 tokens to be mirrored into the DAppChain

Pegging (this is in future releases)

Gaming Features

Matchmaking

Online Presence (Messaging in later releases)

Conclusion

This was a whirlwind update on all the progress from the Loom SDK Beta. We have gotten a sampling of all the 5 internal DAppChains at Loom, which should give you a good idea of the types of apps that will be supported by the SDK.

Stay tuned — we will be breaking down each part in technical detail in upcoming blog posts!

All this look good? Sign the beta application to get it early!