Sick and tired of gas fees - we are buying 1 ETH worth of $LRC

Ethereum is here to stay, that’s for sure. But without a doubt, we need to address the current scaling issues and the congested network making gas fees skyrocket. Projects like Cardano, Solana, and Polkadot are competing to be the next “Ethereum killers''. Yet, in reality, what all these technologies had in common was ending up building bridges to Ethereum. It turned out that it wasn't that easy to slay the dragon after all. The major digital assets are on Ethereum, the users are on Ethereum and my freaking Wall Street Chads are on Ethereum.

"Ethereum is here to stay and Loopring will make it scale, to-dao-fucking-moon."

Everyone has probably heard the phrase “Ethereum won’t scale” and “Ethereum’s gas fees are too high”. There’s no doubt that the Ethereum network is highly congested and has been for a couple of years, hence Ethereum 2.0. With the current version of Ethereum, there are about 15 [1] transactions per second (TX/s. With Ethereum 2.0 Proof of Stake (PoS) implementation the TXs increase to about 50 TX/s.

In addition, Ethereum 2.0 will implement something known as sharding where you can split up the database horizontally. In other words, sharding is a process that takes each block and divides it up into 64 “shards” that can be processed in parallel which would give us a little over 3,000 TX/s. Now, we’re looking at 24/7 decentralized exchanges, NFT markets, NFT-powered virtual worlds, and blockchain gaming. For example, a single player in a blockchain game may be making multiple transactions every minute, and halting gameplay to wait for each transaction to finalize simply won't work.

Enter Layer 2 and Loopring which inherits the security benefits from Ethereum while transactions are performed off-chain. This is essentially a parallel secondary blockchain that interfaces with the main chain. The Loopring project began in June 2017, started out as a decentralized exchange protocol, and has now grown to be so much more. With Loopring, the protocol reaches throughput approximately 1,000 times greater than Ethereum. Additionally, transactions on Loopring cost less than a cent. Imagine trading NFTs and ERC20 tokens on L2 instead of on Ethereum's main chain.

It’s inevitable to not mention this. For several months there has been wild speculation about a potential partnership with Loopring and GameStop. GameStop has communicated that they’re building an NFT marketplace and rumors have been flourishing that Loopring is the protocol for building that particular marketplace. Just recently there was a filing for the SEC [2] actually confirming the partnership, yet there is more to come.

The Loopring team has been working hard the last couple of months implementing the NFT contracts for L2. They communicated that there will be an airdrop of 10 000 Loopheads [3] and just this week the first airdrops of Loopheads arrived on Looprings L2. Currently, the floor price is at 1.35 ETH. The NFT feature is big, imagine minting and trading NFTs without gas fees basically but with the same security as Ethereum has.

This is what I think will drive the LRC price during 2022:

• Solana and Polygon in all honor but they’re off chains without the security Ethereum provides. Just look at the recent attacks on Polygon [4] and Solanas's downtime issues [5].

• The marketplace that GameStop is building

• The NFT support implemented

• In game assets as NFTs without gas fees

• Direct threat to shitty centralized Binance and Coinbase

  • Be your own bank
  • Decentralized trading
  • Not your wallet, not your coin

• The current price is at $1.04 with an ATH at $3.37 after the initial GameStop rumors.

• The price jumped from $0.37 to $3.37 just on some rumors and ever since there’s a lot of eyes on Loopring. As soon as there’s a little traction the price will take off.

• Enter strategy

  • 50% instantly - since the price is relatively low and there's not much action right now. Waiting for new partnerships and further announcements.
  • 10% over the next 6 months - to average down price

• Exit strategy

  • Hold during 2022
  • Minimum 200%
  • I suggest an internal voting round at the end of 2022:
    • Do we still believe the price will go up? And are we satisfied with the gains?
    • Or do we sell and take the profits.

TLDR;

• Ethereum is congested and gas prices have skyrocketed. The implementation of Ethereum 2.0 will not suffice in terms of scaling since 24/7 decentralized exchanges, NFT markets, NFT-powered virtual worlds, and blockchain gaming is upon us.
• L2 is a scaling solution to Ethereum bundling thousands of transactions on a side chain and publishing it onto the main chain lowering gas fees and increasing TX/s
• Loopring is an L2 solution where you use, trade, grow, and store your assets.
• Loopring is a competitor to Binance and Coinbase, however completely decentralized
• There’s an ongoing discussion that Loopring will be the underlying technology for GameStop’s NFT marketplace

References [1]. https://blog.coinbase.com/scaling-ethereum-crypto-for-a-billion-users-715ce15afc0b [2]. https://news.gamestop.com/node/19586/html [3]. http://loopheads.info/ [4]. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polygon-matic-reveals-hacked-earlier-103532665.html [5]. https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/