Loom Network Revamp 2021 Q2
Business Development
We’ve just completed another funding round with private investors, the new capital that was raised in this round will allow us to commit more resources to building out our blockchain tech. Our investors in this round have made it clear that they want Loom Network to focus on building infrastructure, and to secure new technical and strategic partnerships.
We’ve also started expanding our Marketing and Community management team. Our first hire is a community manager that we’re on-boarding today! And we’ll have a new marketing expert on-boarded in the next couple of weeks. We’ll be reinvesting in this team significantly over the next few months in order to expand our social media presence.
With our new investment team on board tokenomics and community engagement have become top priorities. The community has been eagerly waiting for us to publish a timeline, so in the rest of this article we’re going to break things down by quarter, keep in mind this is a tentative timeline.
2021 Q1 Deliverables
LOOM Token Swap
We announced the deployment of the new LOOM token contract at the beginning of February. Later that month, Upbit became the first exchange to support the new LOOM token, then in March they were joined by Bithumb, Binance, and CoinEx.
This month we’ve also swapped over all the LOOM previously deposited to our Basechain network, and enabled staking of new LOOM tokens on Basechain.
LOOM is listed on a lot of exchanges, so we expected it would take a while to get all of them to support the new token. Overall, the swap is progressing well, though we are aware of some issues with token holders sending the wrong version of LOOM to various exchanges, please keep an eye on the exchange information in the token swap launch article to avoid any further mishaps while the swap is on-going. We expect more big exchanges to swap over to the new LOOM token in the next few weeks, along with a few of the smaller ones.
Healthcare
We’ve spent the last year building tech primarily for our healthcare projects. However, our contracts have made it difficult to keep the community engaged, and our investors and the community think we should take a different approach going forward.
Specifically, it’s been suggested that Loom Network should return to its roots and get more developers using Basechain and the Loom SDK.
It’s hard to argue against this sentiment in the current economic conditions, so we’ll be shifting more resources from our healthcare projects to Basechain, and the Loom SDK 3.0.
As mentioned previously, some of the tech we built for our healthcare projects will also be integrated into the upcoming Loom SDK 3.0, and will be available for general use. With the additional capital investment we’re also going to be looking at developing new features specifically for DeFi and NFT applications.
Community Development
We’ve received a lot of feedback from the community this quarter about improving our community engagement, we’ve taken it on-board and have come up with an action plan that will be put in motion over the following weeks. To start with, we’ll be re-opening our community Telegram group, and shifting any general chit chat about the project from the developers group.
As mentioned earlier, we’ve made some new hires in community management and marketing. Over the next few weeks you’ll see these people on Twitter, Medium, Telegram, and Reddit. Please reach out to them if you have constructive feedback and suggestions.
Expect to see more news, more social media updates, more blog posts, and more partnerships this year!
New Home Page
We have two major updates to the homepage in the pipeline, and a facelift to the social media profiles in the works. The first update to our homepage will be out within a week, to present a more accurate idea of our renewed focus on blockchain tech. The second update will be a major redesign by an external design firm, along with revamped site content to provide a better idea about what Loom Network is building, this is expected to come out next month. More design refreshes to our logo and other areas will follow.
2021 Q2 Deliverables
Modernizing LOOM Staking
Staking LOOM on Basechain is no longer as rewarding as it was when we first launched staking. The high gas fees on Ethereum Mainnet make depositing and withdrawing LOOM on Basechain uneconomical if you’re only staking a small amount, even though the staking transactions themselves are free! Furthermore, the DeFi landscape has changed significantly since we first launched staking on Basechain, there’s a lot more competition out there now, and we’re going to have to provide better staking incentives to encourage more people to stake their LOOM.
Staking LOOM from Binance Smart Chain
Binance Smart Chain is a smart contract capable network that offers significantly lower transaction fees than Ethereum, we’re going to take advantage of this to offer LOOM holders an alternative low cost way of staking their tokens. We’ll be upgrading our staking dashboard to allow LOOM holders to cheaply transfer LOOM between Basechain and Binance Smart Chain. The upgraded dashboard will allow Basechain delegators to deposit new LOOM for staking, and to withdraw staking rewards, at a fraction of the current cost!
If you consider the current Ethereum transaction fees to be a mere rounding error, don’t worry, you’ll still be able to transfer LOOM between Basechain and Ethereum on the staking dashboard. Our new integration with Binance Smart Chain will be strictly in addition to the existing capabilities of the dashboard, and will not replace the existing integration with Ethereum.
LOOM Staking Derivatives
To provide an additional incentive for staking LOOM we’re currently looking into issuing tokens representing the LOOM staked on Basechain, delegators would then be able to utilize these tokens to boost their rewards while their LOOM tokens are locked up on Basechain. We’re happy to consider community proposals that address this issue.
LOOM BEP20 Token
The LOOM token will be deployed to Binance Smart Chain as a BEP20 contract in order to allow LOOM holders to cheaply and quickly transfer LOOM between Basechain and Binance Smart Chain. LOOM will become a true multi-chain token, and users will be able to transfer their LOOM between Ethereum Mainnet, Basechain, and Binance Smart Chain with ease.
DeFi on Binance Smart Chain
The low fees offered by Binance Smart Chain have allowed a number of popular DeFi projects to flourish there, including DEXes and yield farms. We’ve got some exciting integrations in store for the LOOM token on Binance Smart Chain!
2021 Q3/Q4 Deliverables
Loom SDK 3.0
The Loom SDK is over 3 years old now, and continues to be one of the most cutting edge, multi chain scaling solutions. Here’s a sneak peak of the features we plan to release in the next major version of the Loom SDK. There’s a lot more coming, but we’ll dive into the details in future technical articles.
- zkRollup architecture and tooling
- Optimistic Rollup with liquidity providers
- Cross Chain Oracles, similar to Band Protocol and Chainlink
- Binance Smart Chain support
Ecosystem of Blockchains
For the foreseeable future no one blockchain will be able to scale to run every conceivable dapp, and today all practical scaling solutions rely on offloading compute and storage to other more specialized chains. We’ve always envisioned our Basechain network as a central piece in an ecosystem of blockchains, with the LOOM token acting as a medium of exchange between all members of the ecosystem, but we had to temper our ambitions to match our capital. With new investment we can once again start building that ecosystem.
Basechain already provides interconnections to Ethereum, Tron, and Binance Chain, and Binance Smart Chain support will be coming soon. Our Loom SDK allows developers to quickly spin up new Loom chains specialized for their applications. However, it’s not really practical for each developer to maintain their own interconnections to other major blockchains, so Basechain will act as a single interconnection point for application specific Loom chains, allowing them to transfer assets to other major blockchains via Basechain for a small fee.
Multi Chain NFTs
Love them or hate them, NFTs are a hot commodity right now! The Loom SDK had built-in support for NFTs before they were cool, and we’ll be looking at building some new features that allow developers and less technically inclined creators to easily mint multi chain NFTs. NFT holders will then be able to use their multi chain NFTs in dapps running on different chains by leveraging Basechain’s ever growing interconnections to other networks.
DeFi Loom Chains
Today most of the popular DeFi protocols run either on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain, but they each have to bootstrap their own liquidity pools that are siloed on each chain. We’re going to make it simpler to spin up new dedicated Loom chains for DeFi protocols by implementing new features targeting this use case in Loom SDK 3.0. These new specialized Loom chains will allow developers to build a new generation of DeFi protocols that utilize liquidity pools funded by assets across multiple chains, in a manner similar to THORChain.
What’s next?
To recap, we‘ve just secured a new round of funding! We’re shifting back to building blockchain tech, with our Basechain network as our primary focus. We’ll be ramping up community engagement, boosting our marketing, and pumping out more technical articles on Basechain and the Loom SDK! As we shift more of our resources towards building an ecosystem of blockchains that can sustain tomorrow’s DeFi protocols and NFT dapps we’ll also be slowly winding down our healthcare projects.
We want to hear from you, what do you want to see next?
Loom Network is building an ecosystem of blockchains to sustain the next generation of DeFi protocols, NFTs, and high-performance multi chain dapps. At the core of this ecosystem is our Basechain network— already live in production, audited, and battle-tested.
New to Loom? Start here.
Want to stake your LOOM tokens and help secure Basechain? Find out how.
