Loom Network has been going full throttle ever since we started the company — picking up many “firsts” along the way. We pride ourselves on not only building the first large-scale interop blockchain solution, but also dogfooding our own tech by building Loom dapps from the ground up — CryptoZombies, DelegateCall, Relentless, and EthFiddle — as well as our own block explorers and staking tools.

We’ve done a lot in a relatively short period of time. Now, 2020 will be all about narrowing in and focusing on what matters most: our Basechain mainnet and new target markets.

It’s time to level up.

At this point, we have already solved scaling and performance for games, and our competitors are barely keeping up.

In the early days of Loom, we overly branded ourselves as a platform for games, and we’ve since grown to be so much more than that. It’s now time to tackle other industries.

Starting today, we are moving towards a more open and larger vision for Basechain. Our core focus areas moving forward will be in DeFi, government, and enterprise.

Don’t worry, games will still run on Basechain as always, and there are still lots of game devs deploying to Basechain each month. But there are millions of other developers that can utilize the power of the blockchain — and we’re making it a point to reach them.

DeFi

For months now, we have been talking a lot about decentralized finance (DeFi) and how we’re making a move in that direction. In fact, one of the best new DeFi dapps, AliceFi, is already live in production on Basechain.

We recently announced a partnership with MakerDAO to bring Dai onto multiple chains, and I also wrote a post about the next generation of DeFi with multichain collateralized assets. We definitely see this as a core growth area for Loom Network.

Governments

Governments are going to be one of the largest users of blockchain tech. Validating and signing documents for millions of citizens is an error-prone and costly endeavor. Recently, we have been doing some proofs of concepts for the Thai government around validating and authenticating medical records on the blockchain. We continue to see growth in this sector and will be putting in a lot of work to support these customers. Governments and corporations need to manage private keys with HSMs, have better GUIs, and implement monitoring tools that are still not common place in the blockchain space.

Interoperability

Interoperability has immense value in this space. We will continue to broaden and strengthen our integrations with other blockchains, based on where the most users are. We already have live interop with Ethereum, Binance, and Tron. Bitcoin is coming later this year.

In 2020 and beyond, we see the need for interop platforms growing more and more, and we’ll be seeing other smart interop platforms emerge and grow — maybe Polkadot or some others that manage to go live. Developers are already building multichain tokens between Ethereum and Binance Chain’s BEP2 standard. We’re also seeing DeFi apps able to take interest across multiple chains. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Speed

We will continue to keep our competitors at bay. Loom Network will see 10x improvements with speed and reliability in 2020. This is partially due to our implementation of sharding and Wasm as key building blocks. Quite a few projects have failed to use sharding effectively, but we’ll be using a novel state driven approach to get it done right.

I’ll be writing more articles in the future about how our sharding will work. Wasm is probably the feature we are most excited about, as it will enable things like Javascript and Rust contracts. In reality, any language could be compiled to Wasm — so as more languages (more secure than Solidity) emerge, Basechain will be able to support them.

Refocusing

We think that our mainnet and token are what matter most as we move into the next era of Loom Network. We have to shed some excess in order to level up.

We recently mentioned that we’d be spinning off CryptoZombies to be run by Clever Flare — a new and exciting e-learning platform for developers. We love CryptoZombies and think it’s one of the greatest things we have ever built. However, while our focus has been shifting more toward Basechain, the code school simply hasn’t gotten the love and attention that it deserves. Better to pass the torch and have another team put more into it.

In Short

2020 is the year of maturity for Loom Network — focusing on what matters most, as well as growing our customer base and users. We will reach new markets in DeFi, government, and enterprise. Of course, we will keep supporting the many games and social apps that continue to launch on the network.

Basechain speeds will grow 10x with new sharding and Wasm engines. We have trial programs in the works with the Thai government, which will expand their use of the blockchain.

We are slimming down areas of the business (i.e. CryptoZombies) that don’t directly support Basechain or the LOOM token.

In 2020, we are lean and mean, and ready for business. So come join us…

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