Loom Network (LOOM) Review – Bringing Ethereum DApps to Twitter Scale

Loom Network’s goal is to realize a future where communities like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, StackOverflow and Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) run on a blockchain that is completely community-driven and censor-free. Its does this with its DAppChains, full-featured blockchains built to run in parallel to Ethereum Smart Contracts.

The Idea and the Team Behind Loom Network

Loom Network wants to allow developers to build applications for more than just financial transactions. It wants them to be able to build games and social applications on the blockchain as well through the use of DApps that run on their own sidechain. These DApps run data that is public and forkable, just like Ethereum and Bitcoin.

“With Bitcoin came the world’s first blockchain, a decentralized ledger of financial transactions that cannot be counterfeited, forged, or modified,” said James Duffy, cofounder of Loom Network to VentureBeat. “Ethereum took it a step further by allowing developers to upload indelible pieces of code into the Blockchain, called ‘smart contracts.’ Loom Network is the next logical step in this evolution — it allows developers to run these unstoppable applications on a massive scale.”

The Loom Network, based in Bangkok, has three co-founders who all had experience working on Ethereum and understood its scalability challenges. Co-founder James Martin Duffy, is also the creator of CryptoZombies, an interactive code school that teaches how to write smart contracts in Solidity through building a crypto-collectable game. Previously, he was the co-founder of Auragin, a natural Korean red ginseng supplement. He has a bachelors in mathematics from Virginia Tech and has been involved in the cryptocurrency space since 2013.

Co-founder Luke Zhang came to Loom Network after working as the lead developer at BlockMason, a blockchain developer aimed at providing world-class decentralized programs on the blockchain. He has a bachelors in administrative studies and marketing from York University, with a specialization in marketing with digital media.

Co-founder Matthew Campbell, has experience working at Digital Ocean, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Gucci, and Cartoon Network. He has a degree from Georgia State University.

Loom Network Partnerships

Loom Network announced a partnership with TrustWallet for deeplinking support. (Deeplinking is how mobile apps communicate with one another to perform complex tasks, such as logging into Facebook or paying with WeChat).

In addition, China’s biggest mobile game platform and one of the most widely used game engines in the world with 106 million active users, Cocos, announced future integration with Loom Network. Cocos game developers are now able to easily integrate with Loom DAppChains and build their own blockchain games.

Loom Network Token Price History

Loom Network was privately funded as part of Techstars NY where they successfully raised $25 million in funding. The initial price of the LOOM token was $0.076, or 0.00122 ETH. The price of the token peaked at the beginning of May to $0.71.

The Loom Technology

Decentralized applications, or DApps, on the blockchain today face a number of challenges which make it impossible for them to scale. First, they are competing with other DApps and financial transactions for resources, and second, all transactions, whether large or small, are treated with the same level of security.

In response to these challenges, the Loom network allows developers to use a DAppChain, which is basically a DApp running as a sidechain. Sidechains offer the ability to experiment and build networks that are more efficient because you can customize the “rule-set” and use it to offload computations from another chain. Its security is maintained by the mainchain’s consensus algorithm.

DApps running on Loom Network’s DAppChains have a number of advantages:

• They are democratic – Users on the DApp can vote for or against projects involving the DApp, such as updates. The users have a greater voice as compared to traditional web services.
• They are scalable – Transactions on each DAppChain are specific to that particular DApp, and the consensus algorithm for each is optimized accordingly.
• They are public and shareable – DAppchains allow the running of a node to give users a copy of the data. This allows for further innovation. For example, developers can release a new game that uses info from old games, such as old existing characters and assets.

They are secure – DAppChains represent communities, which means that the incentive for bad behavior is far less than in blockchains such as Ethereum which are transferring huge sums of money. In any event of attack, however, the community can freely fork if needed.

The LOOM Token

The LOOM token is a membership token for Loom Network, and functions similar to a software license key. Currently you can use LOOM tokens to gain user tier access and transfer tokens between Loom DAppChains and Ethereum. User tier access costs one LOOM. In the future, other memberships will exist for developers to build and run DApps on the network.

At this point the proposed cost of entry for future memberships is as follows:

• 10 tokens for casual developers
• 100 tokens for professional developers, who will then have their DApps listed on Loom Network’s DApp marketplace

Tokens will also be necessary to run nodes that validate transactions on a DAppChain. As these networks scale, the minimum token requirement to operate that network will also increase.

How to Purchase LOOM

The main exchange for purchasing LOOM is on Binance, which currently has the largest exchange of the currency. LOOM can be traded on Binance for BTC, ETH, and BNB.

LOOM is also available on the following exchanges:

• GOPAX (Trade LOOM with KRW on GOPAX)
• Kucoin (Trade LOOM with BTC on Kucoin)
• LATOKEN (Trade LOOM with ETH on LATOKEN)
• Hotbit (Trade LOOM with BTC on Hotbit)
• IDEX (Trade LOOM with ETH on IDEX)

How to Store LOOM

LOOM can be stored in any wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens such as Coinomi, MetaMask and Myetherwallet.

For maximum security, however, you should store your LOOM on hardware wallets such as Ledger Nano S and Trezor.

Roadmap and Future Plans

In March, Loom Network’s first DAppChain, DelegateCall.com, went live. Similar to Steemit in terms of it being a Q&A forum, it focuses on Blockchain and Ethereum programming. It functions the same as a web 2.0 app but it runs on the blockchain.

As of June, Loom Network’s SDK is live. The company wishes to add many new features including:

• TransferGateway support for ERC20/ERC721/Ethereum
• ERC721 Plasma Cash support
• Unity Solidity examples
• Cron blockchain support
• Token pegging
• ERC20/ETH Plasma Cash support
• Hardfork manager
• Extended Sybil resistance framework

Rather than publishing an official roadmap, however, the company prefers to make announcements on its Telegram channel.