To The Loom! — The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Loom Network

When we were at the starting point of our careers, I bet we all have had been at several crossroads that led to various pathways and required a path to be chosen urgently. I’m sure you are now proud of making the right choices at some of those moments, and are happy with how things have turned out. On the other hand, perhaps some of those choices didn’t work out well, unfortunately, like it happened with me. For instance, I made a bad decision about what to study when I was about to enroll to university. As a result, I wasted 8 years of my life by struggling to get back to what I really wanted.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that, considering my experience, if you are about to begin your career as a blockchain or dApp developer, it is of upmost importance to carefully analyze the pros and cons of the available blockchains, and to decide on the most sensible one to put your efforts on for the following years. It is clear that only a few of the current blockchains will survive and be available 10 years, or even 30 years after today. The rest will unfortunately disappear and even their names will be forgotten.

A similar example to this survival problem exists within programming languages. If you are somehow involved in the software industry, I bet you would already know the names of popular programming languages we use today like Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, React, Swift, PHP, and Visual Basic. Yet, you might not be aware that there are more than 250 programming languages in the world as of today, and if you had made the decision of focusing your efforts on one of the unfamiliar languages like Oberon, ChucK, Action!, or Lasso, maybe you would have been unemployed today. Sorry! :(

Coming back to the point, if you are going to be a blockchain developer, in this article, I want to tell you about a blockchain project that will possibly become the ‘Java’ of the blockchain industry. I expect this project not only to survive among a total of 2400 cryptocurrencies (as of today) but also to become one of the mainstream blockchains that will be adapted by both developers and users globally. So, this article might also help you if you are just looking for investing opportunities ;) Anyway, perhaps not to your surprise, this project I want to explore is Loom Network. If you haven’t heard of it before, or if you want to learn more, keep reading!

First things first, let’s simply define what Loom Network is. Well, Loom Network is a blockchain network supported with sidechains that enables dApps to be built on top of it. Loom Network provides interoperability, security, performance, and totally cool user experience and developer experience for all dApps built on its blockchain. It is ideal for building decentralized games, social media, DeFi projects, and more. Now, let’s dig deeper and discuss these topics one by one.

Interoperability

Interoperability is one of the main issues with blockchain technology today. Almost all project teams, whom build their own blockchain, design them to work on their own, inside a closed system. This locks the users in that single blockchain and prevents the blockchain from interacting with other networks. Loom Network has the ambition of solving this problem by integrating with other major blockchains, enabling these networks to talk to each other, and let Loom Network developers access all those other users on integrated blockchains, massively increasing user base and adoption. As it is very difficult for developers to predict which blockchains will survive in the future, they can simply minimize risks by building on Loom Network, and Loom team will take care of the rest.

The major blockchain networks that Loom Network has currently completed integration with include Ethereum, Tron and Binance Chain. In the future, Cosmos and EOS will be integrated as well, which is pretty exciting!Yet, the most important integration to come, in my opinion, is with Bitcoin! Yes, you heard that right. This is not a complete integration though but Loom Network is adding Bitcoin support to its Basechain. When that arrives, we will be able to make Bitcoin transactions on Basechain within 1 SECOND and at ZERO FEE. How amazing is that! Also, the interface will be so simple that not only the users will be able to easily use but also developers will be able to easily integrate it. I think this is a serious development because, with its current abilities, Bitcoin cannot be used as a means of exchange.

Yes, I know Lightning Network is proposed to solve Bitcoin’s current drawbacks but it has its own drawbacks as well. Even after Lightning Network, it is still not user friendly to buy yourself a meal with Bitcoin. In this context, I believe Loom Network really has a great chance to get wide adoption.

Security

The more validators (or miners) on a blockchain network, the more secure that blockchain is. This is a simple rule of the technology. As the number of these roles increase, it becomes harder for evil attackers to come together and form the validating majority (achieve more than 50% of votes/hash power), create their own blocks, and then sustain it.

Loom Network is designed as Layer 2 solution interoperable with Ethereum so Loom developers and users get on board with the enchanced security provided by the huge community of Ethereum blockchain. As there are so many Ethereum miners, we can assume dApps built on Loom Network will be pretty secure as well.

Performance

Loom Network utilizes Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), which is a consensus algorithm that is based on representation of transactions. In simpler words, there are large-scale validators on the network, and individuals like us can vote for one of those validators, whom then validate and approve transactions. These validators are generally organizations, so this system as a whole resembles me a democratic election in which we vote for a political party and then it competes with other parties to win the election. In DPoS-based blockchains, these parties also compete to get the highest vote and be the one to ‘forge’ the next block, which in return brings rewards paid by the network (voters get rewarded for staking their assets –or, voting- as well!). Anyway, having utilized DPoS algorithm, Loom Network has enabled very low energy consumption, amazingly fast confirmation times and high transaction throughput. These abilities must be provided to create a real-time and large-scale app.

To make a comparison, with Bitcoin, we have to wait about 30 minutes for a transaction to be securely approved but with Loom Network, it is even possible to create the next Facebook on which we are able to do anything, from sending instant messages to inviting a friend, amongst 2.4 billion monthly active users of the network, to like our new Facebook page. Just like building a social media dApp, you can create a multiplayer online game on Loom Network as well, which requires a lot of transaction throughput and fast confirmation times as well. Within this article, I will also mention some of the funniest games already built on Loom Network too, so keep reading! :)

User experience

We have already mentioned the performance Loom Network can provide. So, I won’t repeat here how fast transaction times can lead to great user experience but instead, it is important to know that using cryptocurrencies or digital assets on Loom Network is seamless and piece of cake. For instance, dApp users on Loom Network neither need to download a cryptocurrency wallet software to use a dApp nor they spend a penny for transactions they make. Rather, developers pay a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume. We will be discussing user experience all along the article already, so let’s get moving.

Developer experience

Loom Network is based on Solidity, the programming language developed and adopted by Ethereum developers. Today, a lot of blockchain developers have already learned Solidity and are writing smart contracts on Ethereum using this language. So, by learning Solidity, it is possible for developers to work on both Ethereum and Loom Network, which greatly softens the learning curve. On top of that, Solidity has a very similar syntax to JavaScript, the most commonly used programming language, so it is easy for most developers to switch to Solidity.

In addition to the language, Loom SDK is also a great benefit for Loom Network developers. It allows devs to quickly create their own blockchains connected to the network. It is so easy that developers can do this even without completely understanding how blockchain works.

Moreover, Loom Network provides dApp developers with their own sidechain to Ethereum. This brings all the benefits that Ethereum Network provides, like supporting ERC-20 and ERC-721 based cryptocurrencies but not only that! Loom developers are also able to utilize any consensus algorithm on these sidechains. For instance, although the BaseChain on Loom Network uses DPoS, on sidechains, developers can utilize PoI, PBFT, VBFT, Roll-DPoS, or any other consensus algorithm they like. This a great feature because developers aren’t locked in a single option.

Gaming & Blockchain

With the increased adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, we have noticed gaming industry has been positioning itself to adapt to this new technology as well. Today, the bargaining power is slowly being shifted from huge game development organizations to the gamers. Two most important benefits brought to gaming with these popular technologies are:

In-Game Economies: We used to buy skins, weapons, coins and other items from the centralized game developer companies, and if we wanted to trade with other players, we mostly had to go to unofficial websites which made us pay high commissions and take the risk of not getting the payment at all. Now, we can directly and safely trade these cryptographically secured digital items with other players without having to pay any commission to any centralized company. Also, it is now much easier to turn these items into actual money by selling the cryptocurrencies on an exchange.

Digital Asset Ownership: Before, the items we purchased in-game were just some data stored on the game developer’s centralized database, and they would stay there as long as the database remained functional. Or, the company could ban your account and you would simply lose all your items. Now, it is possible to actually own an in-game asset which will remain on decentralized blockchain forever.

Now, let’s mention a few lovely games developed on Loom Network:

Relentless: Battle others in this trading card game, acquire and trade cards!

Axie Infinity: Get your own pet, fight with other pet trainers, evolve your pet, and viola!

Battle Racers: Race and trade with others, collect parts, customize your car, all on VR!

Crazy House: Play casino games with a fair chance to win the reward!

Loom Token

Those games look cool, right? I bet they are! Anyway, now that we have briefly discussed why Loom Network is a favorable project, I want to mention one of my studies which might help you find out much more about Loom Network. I call this study ‘Ozargun Valuation Framework (OVF)’, which is a framework I created and have been developing that evaluates cryptocurrencies and ICOs with regard to 100+ topics and defines whether they are undervalued or overvalued. I have been evaluating cryptocurrencies according to this framework for over one year and have constantly been updating the scores as I hear news about the projects. As of today, my framework points out that Loom Token is the 2nd most undervalued cryptocurrency available in the market among all the cryptocurrencies that I had the time to analyze. This article was actually meant to introduce Loom Network to you and I really don’t want to lead to any investment suggestions here. So, I won’t give more details about why one should invest in Loom Network here but you are always welcome to check out my online spreadsheet based and see the details for yourself.

Lastly, I’d appreciate if you could like/upvote/share this post so that it can reach the ones that actually need it.

Best wishes,

Cem Goksel Ozargun

Thank you for reading. I hope to see you in my next post! Meanwhile, please check the links below:

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