Loopring (LRC) vs. Polygon in ZK Rollup Battle

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Recently, I posted a video blog about Polygon and ZK rollup technology. I was praising polygon’s ZK rollup tech for Ethereum scaling, and a viewer challenged me in a comment. He said that Polygon is not all that great. It has weaknesses. And, he is correct.

Polygon is a sidechain, and it uses a trusted bridge. But, Loopring is not a sidechain, and it is not dependent on a trusted bridge.

Loopring uses a relayer to do ZK rollups. And, if the relayer network fails, the ZK rollups would stop working. But, you could still use the Ethereum blockchain to withdraw your assets from the Loopring smart contracts.

This is not the case with Polygon. You would have to use the Polygon bridge to withdraw your assets from Polygon to Ethereum.

So, Loopring could be the better ZK rollup tech for Ethereum scaling.

Polygon is committing $1 billion to developing ZK rollup technology for Ethereum. When ETH2 introduces sharding in phase 1, Polygon wants to dominate Ethereum scaling. And, next year, ZK rollups are very likely the best solution to help Ethereum scale.

Loopring has only raised $150 million. Loopring has about 15 developers compared to about 50 developers at Polygon. But, there are several reasons why Loopring may be the better ZK rollup tech now.

Loopring uses the security of Ethereum
Loopring is an L2 that is not a sidechain
Loopring does not use a bridge.

Currently, Loopring and Polygon are not rivals. They are both layer two solutions for Ethereum. But, Loopring focuses on hosting AMMs on Ethereum. Polygon is a general purpose L2 with a bridge to and from Ethereum.

Both are scaling solutions. Both solutions bring throughput, speed and reduced fees to the Ethereum network. At the present time, Loopring can handle up to 2,000 transactions per second, and Polygon can process up to 7,000 TPS.

There are some other differences. While Polygon is open source, the Loopring relayer is proprietary.

There are a couple of other contenders in the ZK rollup solutions to scale Ethereum shards. But, I have focused on Polygon and Loopring, because both have tokens that are used to pay gas fees. Polygon uses the MATIC token, and Loopring uses the LRC token.

I am invested in both MATIC and LRC. And, I am waiting to find out who will be the winner in scaling Ethereum, when Ethereum sharding is introduced in 2023.

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