A week ago we rolled out our 2018 R&D roadmap. Based on the roadmap, we also had an engineering and a marketing kickoff meeting to bring everyone on the same page. We are very confident that Loopring’s core technologies will be ready for adoption during the year of 2018.

We have confirmed that three engineers will be coming onboard full-time. The first of them is a senior engineer working on Alipay’s core database systems. He is joining us to work on the protocol development and deployment on NEO. The second engineer is a backend architect from meituan.com, he has a very solid background in high performance system and is experienced in developing exchange and match-engines. Last but not least, Chen Wong will join us as a mobile application developer to work on Loopr’s mobile version.

Development

Protocol Smart Contracts

We started live testing the Loopr wallet using real tokens. So far all looks good to us, and no bugs had been reported. The number of pending transactions and fluctuations in gas price has been problem sometimes. But this is something we are relying on the Ethereum team to solve. We have successfully mined rings using as low as 1Gwei as the gas price, but there have been times where we have had to raise gas price up to 30Gwei. You can take a look at those ring-mining transactions here. We are currently collecting addresses for whitelisting. Once that’s complete, we’ll see more trading activities triggered by community testers.

We also deployed Loopring-Token-on-Qtum (LRQ) and the Loopring Protocol v1.0.0 on top of the Qtum mainnet!

We are brainstorming how exactly LRQ should be distributed to LRC holders. We will not be answering questions on this topic, for now, but we will issue a statement in the near future.

The current Qtum deployment uses exactly the same codebase as tjhe v1.0.0 version on Ethereum. Here are the addresses:

* TokenRegistry：QSjBxNvcwyyWsN5wc8wD6DQ7YyVaS31ASo

* RinghashRegistry：QddZU75Vuua2BNA7JvGKKYipR16ovE4zpf

* TokenTransferDelegate：QV2aQmR4FppywaQAn6ArMBEa5UgQhCJqbk

* LoopringProtocolImpl：QdT9We7mo2oaBFnmDXWDRAPHBuhSCaq9SA

We have also started to code v1.1 version for Ethereum/Qtum to incentivize wallets, and to minimize the raw size of ring transactions. V1.1 should be deployed in late Q1 or early Q2.

Wallet

We’ll only fix bugs and add small extra features to Loopr beta1 (available at https://loopring.io). This is due to the fact that we will soon start developing beta2 from scratch, which is actively being designed. That said, during the last 2 week we have done the following work on beta1:

Displaying warnings when an order’s size is larger than the current account balance or allowance.

Converting ETH to Ether Token (WETH) automatically when appropriate (users still have the chance to review the transactions before signing).

A new relay API for returning the list of trading-pairs/markets the relay supports. When a user select a different relay from its wallet, the market list will change to reflect the markets supported by the selected relay.

Customization of order’s time-to-live (TTL) on the Settings page, so now you can submit a order that’s valid for as short as several seconds or as long as several months.

Optimization of the Cancel-All-Order operation.

We have made progress in the design of the next version. The wireframe is being actively reviewed and refined.

Beta2 Wireframe

Relay

The biggest change in design is to apply consortium blockchain technology to our current relay infrastructure. We need to make sure future miners can have access to as many orders as possible. Onchain and Hyperledger’s consortium blockchain technologies will be evaluated and explored over the coming months.

And here is a list of things we’ve accomplished with the relay:

Mining support using multiple accounts (private keys).

Several bug fixes and optimizations.

A relay docker image has been built and published on hub.docker.com. For more details, please visit this link. We also created a docker-compose file for building a relay, Ethereum node, IPFS node, and a MySql database instance together. These four pieces are generally required to start/host a “relay”.

A little more documentations on relay and ring-mining has been added. But, we still think it’s too early for normal users to deploy and run a relay.

Looping.js

This library is in the midst of a major refactoring. The goal is to make the integration with Loopring really easy for wallet developers without writing a lot of boilerplate code. The current plan is to extract 1) a core library to provide fundamental functionalities, and 2) a more advanced library to encapsulate business logics common to most wallets. In Loopr beta1, the sell and buy actions both have over 500 lines of JavaScript code and many of them are very similar; this is true for other operations including Transfer, Approve, Convert，and Cancel operation. This will not be the case in beta2, once we implement the new loopring.js library.

Operation and Marketing