Research & Development

Protocols

The focus for Protocol 3.0 development was mainly on testing, more than doubling the number of tests. More excitingly, we’re also developing a much more efficient way to store the data needed for data-availability.

The current method is quite wasteful in how the data is stored on the blockchain, and is the main bottleneck for the throughput with on-chain data availability. This enhancement we’re working on is still in development but we estimate that the throughput with data-availability will increase from 60–80 trades/second to 100–130 trades/second.

Another thing we’re looking at improving for protocol 3 is our token economics. Protocol 3, using zkSNARKs and introducing new ‘roles’ to the network, is in some ways drastically different from our previous protocols. This gives us the opportunity to make sure everything works together, and use LRC to optimize towards our goals of high liquidity, security, among others.

In the meanwhile, our Oedax implementation is close to being code-complete. Over the next week or two, we’ll perform one more round of internal code review before we open source it.

Relay

We’ve completed all core functionalities in Lightcore Relay after several months of development. We’ve also completed a substantial amount of unit tests and integration tests. Thus, we open sourced Lightcore Relay 1.0!

You can read a blog post about it here, or check out the codebase here.

Anyone or any project can use/fork Lightcone as a matching engine for exchanges built with Loopring Protocol 2 on Ethereum, or on sidechains.

As mentioned, we’ve made incredible progress on Loopring Protocol 3 using zkSNARKs, and we believe Protocol 3 will bring a much better, more scalable trading experience, and it has become our top priority. Thus, we are now focusing on Lightcone Relay 2.0, which is being built to support Protocol 3. Given Lightcone 1.0’s strong base, we have already completed the majority of modules for 2.0 and will start testing the minimum viable product very soon.

Products

We have finalized a UI for Oedax — Open Ended Dutch Auction Exchange — which, as an auction-based market (as opposed to orderbook-based), will be used in token sales.

We are using the Flutter framework, which will help us improve the efficiency of app development and make a unified UI of iOS and Android easier. We have refactored Flutter code, making it easy to use. We have integrated Flutter-Redux for better application state management. With Flutter-Redux, Flutter development will be similar to React development. It also allows developers to learn Flutter development easier. We have written several UI views with Flutter, including address QR code view, backup mnemonics view, order detail view, and others. We have finalized message channels between Flutter and native apps, and how to use gRPC in iOS, Android and Flutter. We are working on Flutter animation now.

Operations & Marketing

🥁IMPORTANT: we’ve released further information and guidance on the upcoming LRC token contract upgrade, happening May 8th, 2019 🥁