The Loom Network intends to become “The next generation blockchain platform for large-scale online games and social apps.”
The Loom Network is catered to (1) gamers and (2) social media users. For gamers, the Loom Network wants to offer provably scarce items, tradable tokens, eternal worlds, and multi-game-spanning universes. For social media users, the Loom Network wants to help its users build social media applications not driven by advertising, monetizable via karma tokens, expandable via multiple-client apps, while minimizing the trust that is granted to centralized social media platforms like Facebook and others.
The Loom Network makes usage of what they call ‘DAppChains’, built on the Ethereum blockchain. DAppChains are full-featured blockchains that are built to run in parallel to Ethereum Smart Contracts. A DAppChain is a type of Ethereum sidechain optimized for scaling data rather than financial transactions. Anybody can create their own DAppChain using the Loom Network. You can simply choose your own consensus mechanism and ruleset, without having to implement the consensus layer, so you can focus on building your Dapp.
There are already several Dapps deployed on the Loom Network. For example, CryptoZombies, where you can learn how to code Ethereum DApps by coding your own game. EthFiddle, a place to share Solidity code snippets. SolidityX, a ‘secure-by-default’ programming language that compiles to Solidity, avoiding bugs and other known pitfalls. And DelegateCall, a decentralized Quora where you can earn tokens by posting and answering questions.
The LOOM token serves as a lifetime membership card to all DApps running on the Loom Network. It allows you to transfer your data and digital assets between Loom DAppChains and the Ethereum mainnet. The token acts like a software license key. It’s implemented as an ERC20 token on Ethereum, which you must hold in a supported Ethereum wallet as Mist, Parity or MetaMask.
The Loom Network is focused on creating DApps for end users. When CryptoKitties was launched, it was shown that an application like this could significantly slow down the Ethereum blockchain. The Loom Network wants to avoid having these types of problems by using Ethereum sidechains.
