Loom Network Update Q4 2022

Much Oww

We generally leave the market commentary to others, but it would be remis to say nothing at all at this point in time, so here goes…

The recent insolvencies of crypto companies left many in shock, and it appears the dominos will continue to fall for some time yet. Let’s hope we won’t have to suffer SBF’s self-pity tour for much longer.

You’ve probably received a bunch of emails from crypto companies lately saying:

• Don’t panic!
• We’re super solvent!
• We do the utmost due diligence!

You didn’t get one of these from us though.

Why?

Because Loom Network doesn’t trade, loan, or borrow against client funds. We’re a blockchain tech company, and our primary directive is to build, not gamble.

Live Community Events

Earlier this year we launched CryptoZombies Live events, these are instructor-led classes covering blockchain development topics such as Solidity, Ethereum, and more! While the CryptoZombies online course curiculum is already quite engaging, working through the curiculum is for the most part a solitary activity. We wanted to give our students the option to learn in a class-like setting, and the opportunity to network with other people that have shared interests.

Our goal was to reproduce the dynamic found in hackathons, where participants set out to build something specific within a limited amount of time. To date the live events have been based around an instructor doing some live coding while building a small project, and answering questions as the event goes on, with some mingling in the CryptoZombies Metaverse space before and after the event itself.

Lets do a quick recap of recent live events…

Building a Trust Fund in Solidity in 60 mins

The instructor for this event was Ed Zynda, a full-stack developer with over 10 years of industry experience who specializes in Web3 and blockchain technologies. He currently works as the lead blockchain engineer at Li.Finance.

Ed set out to build a set of Solidity smart contracts to run a trust fund on Ethereum, in 60 minutes flat. He started off with a brief introduction to the Remix IDE, then explained how to handle smart contract ownership, before diving into the implementation of deposits and withdrawals from the fund. He then went on to explain how Solidity events can be used to notify the dApp front-end about state changes on the blockchain, and finished the class by going over the steps you must take to prevent one of the most common attacks that are used to exploit smart contracts — reentrancy attacks.

Quite a few participants turned up for this event, and there was a fair bit of engagement between Ed and the participants throughout the class.

CryptoZombies on Radix

The instructor for this event was Omar Abdulla, developer at RDX Works, the tech company behind Radix DLT. Radix DLT is a layer-1 blockchain that is purpose-built to unlock the full potential of DeFi through unlimited scalability, security, and asset-oriented programming. Omar works on building the Scrypto language, which is a framework built on Rust. He has extensive experience with smart contracts development and is passionate about DeFi.

Omar explained to the class what asset-oriented programming is all about, and then went through and showed how to write Scrypto contracts to allow the participants to deploy their very own crypto zombies on Radix.

This was the first event that covered a topic outside Ethereum and Solidity, over 30 people showed up for the live event, and there was a lot of engagement by the participants!

Building an NFT Gallery in 30 mins using Alchemy

The instructor for this event was Vitto Rivabella, who works in Developer Relations at Alchemy. Vitto is a web3 developer and educator on a mission to onboard 1 billion users onto web3. Alchemy is a powerful set of web3 development tools that allow developers to build and scale dApps with ease.

Vitto set out to build a simple NFT gallery, in the process he taught the participants about NFT metadata, how to query blockchains using the Alchemy NFT API, and covered the basics of building a dApp front-end using React and NextJS.

This was yet another successful live event, with participants asking interesting questions throughout the class.

CryptoZombies Relaunch

As some of you may already be aware we’ve recently spun off CryptoZombies, the #1 Solidity learning resource, into its own entity, with a dedicated team of ex-Happen Space staff. The CryptoZombies team is now hard at work building out the world’s first social web3 learning platform backed by Loom Network’s Basechain network.

CryptoZombies will also continue to host live events to provide a fun and engaging way to help developers learn how to build and launch web3 projects. If you’ve missed out on the previous live events don’t fret, more events will be announced in the new year!

We’re also super excited about the CryptoZombies roadmap, which includes:

• Updating the Ethereum and Solidity courses to take advantage of latest APIs and tools in the Ethereum ecosystem.
• Expanding the curriculum to cover more blockchain protocols and innovative web3 projects.
• Rolling out iOS and Android support!

The CryptoZombies team recently released a new course in collaboration with TRON DAO that covers smart contract deployment to the TRON network, and will be looking to expand to more protocols in 2023.

You can read more about the CryptoZombies relaunch on their blog, and follow CryptoZombiesHQ on Twitter to get the latest announcements straight from the source.

Development Update

With the CryptoZombies team now handling the course curriculum and live events, the Loom Network blockchain engineering team is focused 100% on building out the Loom Metaverse Platform. The platform leverages cross-chain NFTs to ensure that virtual items are not trapped in small enclaves within the Metaverse, and makes it dead simple to integrate blockchain-backed digital assets, virtual items, and extensive NFT-based privilege systems into tailored Metaverse experiences.

In the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out:

• A new release of loom-js to address compatibility issues with some of the dependencies. We won’t be pushing out any new features in v1.x anymore, new development is happening in v2.x which we expect to release in the new year.
• Updates to our developer documentation at https://loomx.io/developers to utilize modern tooling like Hardhat (instead of Truffle), and to retarget the Ethereum dependent sample code from the deprecated Rinkeby testnet to the Goerli testnet.
• A new EVM-compatible testnet to replace our old (and somewhat unwieldy) Extdev testnet. Expected to launch end of January 2023.

CryptoZombies is expected to be the first project to launch on the Loom Metaverse Platform next year. We’ll be providing a sneak peak at the features in upcoming blog posts.

Wrapping Up

It’s been quite a hectic year! This isn’t our first bear market, and probably won’t be our last either, we’ll continue building regardless. Remember, when the hype dies down you can get some work done :)

Happy New Year everyone!

We wish for a slightly less batshit crazy 2023.

Loom Network is building a Metaverse platform backed by an ecosystem of public blockchains to allow developers to create unique Metaverse experiences with blockchain-backed digital assets, virtual items and NFT-based privilege systems. A key part of this platform is our Basechain network — already live in production, audited, and battle-tested.

New to Loom? Start here.

Want to stake your LOOM tokens so you can earn rewards while helping secure Basechain? Find out how. You can also save a bunch in transactions fees by staking LOOM from Binance Smart Chain, more on that here.

Got experience running Linux servers, and interested in running a Basechain validator node? Reach out to us in our Telegram channel and we’ll tell you all about the current requirements.

Would you like to join us in building the core infrastructure of the blockchain-powered Metaverse? We’re always on the lookout for good Golang, Solidity, and Javascript/Typescript developers, so please email us at hiring@loomx.io if you’re interested.