In this week’s episode we talk with Daniel Wang, CEO and founder of the Loopring protocol. The exchange built on the protocol launched a little over a month ago, with the goal of providing a non-custodial platform, meaning it allows users to keep control of their funds, with similar performance in throughput and cost as centralized exchanges. There’s mind boggling technology with funny names behind this protocol —zero-knowledge proofs, Snarks, Starks,— which Wang demystifies and explains.
We talked about how scalability is a relative and not an absolute measure. To him that means Ethereum 2.0, an upgrade meant to increase the tractions per second on the network, won’t magically solve all scalability issues and Layer 2 solutions, which take part of applications’ data and computation off chain, will still be needed. To him though, users’ security is the wholly grail, and Ethereum is the best place to get it.
Wang also lamented lack of accessibility to Ethereum dapps and dexes in China, and talked about Loopring’s plans to launch a smart wallet geared for the Chinese market which will hopefully help solve this problem.
These are some of the key topics we discussed:

Loopring origins and having to give back most ICO funds

The team’s decision to go all-in on zero-knowledge proofs

The protocol’s tradeoffs: more centralization for faster and cheaper transactions

Why users should use non-custodial exchanges instead of centralized trading platforms

Lack of access to Ethereum dapps in China and smart wallets as the gateway to mass adoption

Ethereum dapps scalability issues and Layer 2 solutions with Eth 2.0