Loom Network Launches Ethereum Scaling Solution

Anyone who has been following along with Ethereum’s ongoing scalability issues has probably heard about Plasma and Casper, two upgrades designed to expand Ethereum’s ability to process transactions and host dapps. Those solutions are still months or possibly years from deployment. This week, however, Loom Network deployed their own scaling solution for dapps to production, along with a test site–DelegateCall.

DelegateCall

DelegateCall is a competitor to Stack Overflow, built as a blockchain-based dapp. It’s live now and you can check out its functionality. According to Loom, its backend is completely decentralized but it can scale the same as a commercial application like Stack Overflow. When users answer questions, they receive ERC20 tokens instead of karma for the upvotes their projects receive.

DAppChains

Loom Network’s scaling solution relies on creating side chains that are bonded to and Ethereum smart contract via a relay. Each dapp gets its own chain, allowing the dapp to scale while still being tied to the security of the Ethereum mining network. These side chains have their own DPoS consensus, and they support custom transaction types like creating accounts, posting messages, and voting. 

Loom Network

In the future, Loom Network aims to support hundreds or thousands of different dapps, each running their own sidechains. In addition to DelegateCall, they’re currently building mobile games to demonstrate the capabilities of their scalable DAppChains. They’ve already released one web-based game (not a DAppChain-based game), CryptoZombies, that teaches you how to code in Solidity.

Ethereum Scalability

For blockchain-based applications and organizations to catch on, we need next generation scaling solutions that can support enterprise applications. What’s so exciting about Loom Network is that they’ve actually built and deployed a product where so many scaling solutions have lived as white papers and marketing speak.

The Loom Network is likely not perfect and it’s still a work in progress, but at least it is progress in a field where so many other proposals have stalled.