Basechain is Coming…

PlasmaChain will become Basechain.

Now that I have your attention…

We are preparing for the largest upgrade to our mainnet ever, and we feel this is the best time to announce its new name — to reflect these major changes and to evoke the essence of the chain’s existence.

When we started Loom, it was born from our personal pain points developing dapps for Ethereum — the transactions were costly, execution and confirmations were slow, and the onboarding experience had much to be desired.

So we wrote down what we wanted: a way to make Ethereum smart contracts 10x faster, 10x cheaper, and at the same time, easier to onboard new users. Coming from a Silicon Valley background, we wanted to make practical and pragmatic choices about the technology, thus we chose Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Plasma Cash. Both of these could be implemented within a year, and were likely to be performant.

Fast forward two years to 2019, and we have achieved what we set out to build: transactions on Loom are gas-free, 10x faster than Ethereum mainnet, and you can onboard users via a variety of wallets, providers, and methods — most them completely seamless to the end user. When we sat down again to make a plan for the next two to five years, it was obvious that faster and cheaper would simply not be enough.

The Changing Space

Looking closely at the blockchain industry, it seems that many people are still stuck with ideas from 2017. They may have new names and new guises for them, but they all boil down to the same old concepts. Meanwhile, the industry has been changing dramatically. We already have fascinating smart contract-less chains dedicated to moving tokens around with Binance Chain and Libra, we have a plethora of stablecoins becoming the preferred tokens for payments, and quietly behind the scenes are the enterprise blockchains being adopted by the established institutions.

People are innovating blockchain tech faster and faster these days, and with all these shifting trends around us, it becomes increasingly difficult for developers to figure out what to do.

• Do I build on Ethereum or another platform?
• Which token should I accept as payment?
• Should I wait for Facebook and build a dapp on Libra?

These are some of the questions we hear when reaching out to individual developers, and they are the exact pain points we identify with.

At Loom Network, we are developers first and foremost — from all the tooling we build, to the trading card game Relentless, and to the free code school CryptoZombies.io, the most popular blockchain school around. In fact, we’re not just developers of blockchain infrastructure; we’re also one of the biggest developers of dapps in general.

So what we would like to do over the next couple years is build a home base for you.

Deploy Once, Get Multichain Support

No matter what new trending chain emerges, we will be interoperable. If there are awesome new wallets or tooling that come out, we will be compatible. Rest assured, when something new comes along, you won’t have to redo all your hard work just so that your dapp is able to talk to it. We’ll be doing all that work for you.

Our goal is for you to deploy your dapp only ONCE to Loom Basechain, and have it automatically get connected to every major blockchain using any kind of wallet — which also means getting exposed to the user base of all these chains combined.

That doesn’t mean we’re merely going to connect to a bunch of chains and call it a day… Our plan is to actively support new blockchain use cases as they emerge. We will continue to scale our capabilities not just in the simple dimensions of speed and cost, but also so that new use cases can get native-level support. Moreover, we are committed to vastly expanding our CryptoZombies code school so you can stay up to date on the latest tech, whatever it may be.

Bringing it on Home

Therefore, in moving beyond a Plasma focus and toward an interconnected multichain platform with Loom Network as the central hub… the main station… the home base — PlasmaChain becomes Basechain.

Whether you are building a dapp or a special purpose chain, we want Loom Basechain to be the tool that makes it easy for you to connect to the larger and ever-evolving blockchain ecosystem.

Token Staking News

We also have some news to share with you regarding LOOM token staking:

1. Increase in Number of Validators

We’ll be onboarding more validators over the next few months, up to a maximum of 50. This is to keep Basechain decentralized and provide more options for stakers to delegate their LOOM tokens to.

If you’re interested in being a validator for Loom Basechain, check out the Validator Requirements, which includes the necessary details and a form to fill out.

2. Lower Fees and Slashing Enabled

Validators will now be able to set fees as low as 5% if they so choose. Slashing will also be enabled.

3. Making LOOM a Multichain Token

In order to maximize liquidity, we are making LOOM a true multichain token so that users can interact with a native LOOM token on whichever blockchain they’re using. The first step is to convert some of the LOOM reserve fund to BEP2 tokens to be used on Binance Chain. Stay tuned for an upcoming article with more details on that.

4. Staking Referral System

A lot of you have been BIG supporters of Loom Network, and we thank you immensely. So we now want to give more back to you in the form of referral rewards.

We’ll soon be implementing a Staking Referral System. Your friends will be able to input your referral code when they create a new delegation, and you’ll get a part of the rewards! (We’ll also enable referrals for native staking from wallets.)

Validators will be able to opt-in to this referral system and set reward percentages. This way, we also hope to further incentivize stakers to know their validators.

5. Social Staking System

We will be creating a new system in which stakers get additional staking rewards each time their validator is voted as the top validator — for doing the best work for the chain.

6. Additional Wallet Support

LOOM staking will soon be enabled on Huobi Wallet, and we’re looking into supporting even more wallets to give LOOM holders as much opportunity as possible to stake their tokens.

We’ll also be improving our APIs in order to support “soft staking” via wallets and exchanges. Soft staking enables LOOM holders to earn staking rewards on their LOOM tokens without needing to use the staking dashboard.

7. New Airdrops

We have partnered with two new projects building on Loom to do exclusive pre-ICO airdrops to LOOM stakers that have tokens locked for 3 months or more. One of these projects is building a casino and the other, an e-learning platform. We’re super excited about these, and we’ll have more details coming soon.

So There You Have It

A new name, new features, and a whole lot of ambition. We’ll keep cranking out the code just as we’ve been doing since Loom began. This major hard fork is coming in the next month — so keep your eyes peeled.

Loom Network is the multichain interop platform for scaling high-performance dapps — already live in production, audited, and battle-tested.

Deploy your dapp to Loom’s Basechain once and reach the widest possible user base across all major blockchains today.

New to Loom? Start here.

Want to stake your LOOM tokens and help secure Basechain? Find out how.

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