Loopring, a blockchain protocol that will facilitate trading between centralized and decentralized exchanges, announced on Monday it has teamed up with UC Berkeley to launch a research program that will focus on cross-blockchain transfer and trading protocols. According to Loopring, the blockchain research program will be led by Professor Alessandro Chiesa, who is a co-inventor of Zerocash and co-founder of Zcash, as well as one of the lead developers of the libsnark library.
While sharing details about the collaboration, Daniel Wang, Founder of the Loopring Foundation, stated:
“Cross-chain protocols with trading automation don’t exist yet, so we are super excited about this direction of research. We understand it’s going to be an arduous challenge and it may take years, but The Loopring Foundation is dedicated to sponsoring and working with academia to push this forward. Professor Chiesa is the best scientist who can lead this blockchain research program.”
Wang then noted:
“Cross-chain trading protocols are fundamental to the interoperability of decentralized networks. Tokens that can be recognized and functional across multiple blockchains will have the greatest utility going forward and help to bridge ecosystem fragmentation.”
Loopring then added that it and UC Berkeley will also explore the possibility of applying zero-knowledge proofs on top of the Loopring Protocol to provide strong privacy guarantees for token-to-token trading activities.