WeDEX, the first DEX built on top of Loopring 3.0, is now live on Ethereum mainnet. On the first day of their beta launch, WeDEX successfully settled more than 20K trades, with Ethereum-level security guarantees — and this cost 1.4 ETH in gas total, at a gas price of ~5.2 gwei. To our knowledge, this is the first working DEX on Ethereum mainnet scaled with zkRollup!

Research & Development

Protocol

We created the first Loopring 3.0 DEX for WeDEX which is now live at:

Contract 0x7d3d221a8d8abdd868e8e88811ffaf033e68e108 is the first live DEX leveraging zkRollup for scalability on Ethereum mainnet. Certainly, it is the first one enforcing on-chain data availability.

Through this contract, you can find transactions that are the proven *batches* submitted to Ethereum. Within them, they contain the actual DEX activities: deposits, withdrawals, and trade settlements. Our upcoming open source DEX Browser is needed to discern the actual granular activity.

The stats & capabilities are exciting:

In the near future, we plan to help WeDEX complete the full lifecycle testing, including testing the Shutdown mode (operators proactively shut down the DEX) and Withdrawal mode (operators violate some protocol rules). In all cases, Loopring protocol ensures DEX users are able to withdraw their rightful assets.

On WeDEX, there are currently about 100 users invited for this first round of beta testing, which will last for one week. For this beta, the Shenzhen-based team is focused on serving Chinese language users, but will open their English language side at some point in January. Feel free to follow them on Twitter to stay tuned.

Products

We have also finished the smart contract implementation for Loopring’s smart contract wallet called “Hebao”, 荷包, which means purse in ancient Chinese. Hebao will be a standalone smart contract wallet, with very tight Loopring v3 integration for user onboarding. Next week we will start unit testing the contract. Our goal is to complete unit testing by the end of February. You can read more about Hebao in our recently published 2020 roadmap.

Lightcone Relayer

Lightcone is now serving WeDEX on Ethereum mainnet — running the exchange’s off-chain operations. We’ll continue to improve Lightcone’s reliability while WeDEX fixes UI issues.

Recall: a relayer is the party that handles all the off-chain & ZKP generation for a Loopring v3 DEX. Lightcone is the relayer implementation that Loopring has built, and is now capable of offering this Relay-as-a-Service for DEX owners.

We’ve also done more rounds of stress testing (30 TPS for 10 hours) and fixed several small issues found during the testing. So far the relayer is stable enough to continuously provide settlement service to WeDEX. We have also improved service monitoring and adjusted notification rules.

We formulated a specific R&D plan for the relayer team for the first half of 2020. Most development for its next version should be done before July 2020. You can read more about it in the roadmap.

Operations & Marketing

12/3/2019 — Loopring and Guarda Wallet started the bounty campaign to help educate people about Loopring v3, DEX scaling and zkRollup.

12/4/2019 — Loopring writes about ‘The Ultimate Non-Custodial Test’ and explains exactly what happens in the worst-case scenario: withdrawal mode.

12/5/2019 — We released Loopring 3.0-beta 4 and its deployment and configuration on Ethereum mainnet! The Lightcone relayer has been integrated with 3.0-beta 4 to provide services for WeDEX.

12/8/2019 — Loopring CMO, Jay Zhou, attended DAOfest in Shanghai and spoke about the governance of DEX protocols, and the dxDAO.

12/9/2019 — LRC opened its Golden Staking Window. If you hold LRC and do not plan to sell within 90 days, you could consider taking advantage of this window (and LRC staking in general) to earn Loopring’s protocol fees.

12/12/2019 — Loopring CMO, Jay Zhou, attended the 2019 China Fintech Shanghai Summit.

12/14/2019 — Loopring CTO, Steve Guo, attended blockchain meetup in Shanghai, sharing the newest development of zkRollup.

12/14/2019 — Loopring CMO, Jay Zhou, attended Startup Leadership meetup in Shanghai, and talked about the future trends of blockchain technology.

12/17/2019 — Loopring published our 2020 Development Roadmap. We suggest giving it a read to look at our priorities and plans over the next year. It’s a big one:

12/19/2019 — We had a team reunion in Shanghai, since most of the team was in one place for the first time in a while!

12/21/2019 — WeDEX, the first DEX building on top of Loopring 3.0, started Phase 1 of their beta. This Reddit thread provides some useful comments/answers.

Beginning January 2020, we’ll switch from bi-weekly to monthly updates. We believe that since protocol v3 is deployed, and because the relayer and DEX products (Hebao) are closed source it makes more sense. Also, in the process of productization, Loopring-based DEXes/Dapps (WeDEX, Dolomite, etc.) will release information of their own, lessening our need for the same update frequency.

Loopring is a protocol for building high-performance, non-custodial, orderbook-based exchanges on Ethereum. You can sign up for our Monthly Update, learn more at Loopring.org, or check out:

Twitter ⭑ Reddit ⭑ Telegram ⭑ GitHub ⭑ Discord ⭑ YouTube ⭑ LinkedIn