Like many of us, I've been intrigued by the sudden popularity of Loopring in the last few weeks.I digged a little bit and, even by setting aside the rumors about a potential partnership with GME, I was amazed by the project. zk-SNARK rollups are an amazing technology, and it could be what finally brings us mass adoption.I worked as a freelance journalist for a few years, so I decided to use my skills to get more information about the project. My idea was to sell my story to a mainstream newspaper (please don't hate, I really think we should reach out more to the general public), but none of them was interested. So I thought that I could give you the Q&A of my email exchange with Daniel Wang, CEO of Loopring. Please keep in mind that my original ideal was to write for the general public, so some questions could seem basic.Here it is, I hope you'll find it interesting!***Q. Scalability has always been a major issue for Ethereum adoption. L2s like Loopring solve this problem, but the infrastructure is still in it's beginnings. Do you think that, in the future, users will only interact with L2s, and that L1 will basically become an under-the-hood settlement layer?A. Yes, I do think this will be the case for most users. A layered design is much easier to scale.Q. How would you describe, in layman terms, the advantages of ZK rollups versus optimistic rollups? Is the withdrawal period the only major difference for the user?A. The waiting period for withdrawals is a major (noticeable) drawback of optimistic rollups, but the other thing people often neglect is that there needs to be watchers of OR blocks to constantly find potential violation of rules and then challenge the operators in a timely minter to protect user’s interest. These watchers need to be incentives and they cannot share the same interests with operators to stay independent. Q. Loopring already has use cases, such as a DEX. But if you think about the finality of your protocol, ten or twenty years down the road, what use cases do you have in mind? Do you plan to be more business/payments-oriented, or game-oriented?A. That’s a good question that I don’t have a good answer for. The blockchain space has been embracing new ideas and technologys on a daily basis. It’s hard to make a road map for even the next two years. We are more interested in building infrastructures instead of focusing on an application. Recently what makes me excited is that progress Ethereum Foundation has made in their zkEVM effort. I believe in a year or two, there will be general purpose zkRollup built on top of it to offer full EVM compatibility. Q. Vitalik Buterin recently talked about the importance of social recovery for wallets. Losing private keys is a big risk for users, and it's holding many people from joining crypto/DeFi. Do you think products like Loopring Smart Wallet can help mass adoption? How do you see the evolution of this product in the next few years?A. Smart wallet with social recovery is really a good product idea, but the adoption is slow due to higher gas cost of deployment and transaction compared with EOA wallets. I believe to solve this barrier to the market, smart wallets shall be deployed onto layer-2s instead of Ethereum mainnet. It will also be great if Ethereum can support converting EOA addresses to contract addresses so people can try EOA first, then convert them to contract-based wallets later to adopt social-revery based solutions.Q. There have been a lot of rumors about a potential partnership with Gamestop, which is allegedly working on a NFT marketplace. Can you tell us more about this potential deal? And beyond Gamestop, how would you describe the way Loopring can integrate in the metaverse?A. I cannot comment on that.Q. How many users do you think DeFi can have in 20 years, and what place do you think Loopring will have in it?I would image most people who have a smart phone will have crypto apps installed and owns some cryptocurrency. By then, Loopring will probably be gone — there will be a lot of younger and smarter people building next generation of technologies to outcompete most existing blockchain platforms/products. It will be sad that two years later most of the current projects are still around. Don’t you agree?EDIT : Here is the proof of my interview : https://ift.tt/3FTz9hA #2 : I should add that I obviously hold a small bag of LRC, so I am not perfectly objective here.
Submitted November 28, 2021 at 09:53PM
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