Radix Report 13th May

Radix DLT — The Decentralized Finance Protocol

6 min readMay 25, 2021

Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO — Radix DLT

The saga of Doge coin continues.

After our favorite creator of rockets, tunnels and electric cars, Elon Musk, appeared on SNL, we saw not just a spike in Doge, but also the meteoric rise of a new breed of copycat Doge coins, cumulating in over $8BN (yes, Billion) worth being set to Vitalik Buterin’s public Ethereum address.

Vitalik promptly donated $1.2bn SHIB tokens to Sandeep Nailwal India Covid Relief Fund. Crypto may be crazy, but if it helps save some lives, I am all for it!

At the same time, Elon poured some cold water on Bitcoin by suspending the ability to buy a Tesla with the currency. Citing environmental concerns with Proof of Work mining, Tesla is now investigating other alternatives with less environmentally damaging security mechanisms.

Personally, I’m going to be lobbying hard for Tesla to take XRD — what else would you want to buy the future of the automotive industry with than the currency of the future financial system!

On the Radix side. The betanet has gone even better than expected, with the wallet, explorer, node runner clients and various services and endpoints being heavily used, and the Radix community getting properly stuck into testing and sending each other transactions, which has been awesome.

A massive shout out to everyone in the community who has been testing our wallet and node runner clients. Thank you.

If you haven’t had a chance to play with it all, please go ahead and grab your betanet wallet from here and get started!

https://www.radixdlt.com/post/radix-betanet-is-live-quickstart-guide

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy — Radix DLT

Momentum may be my favorite word to use in these updates, and now more than ever it’s fitting. The response to the new website, community growth and betanet continues to grow — so let’s dive into some highlights:

Piers has been busy on camera. First up was a live AMA with Binance Influencer of the Year Scott Melker (The Wolf of All Streets) talking about Radix, How DeFi works and why the Radix Engine is so exciting. Across all networks, the event had a total reach of over 500,000 impressions. Not long after finishing there, Piers joined the Crypto Birbs 200k follower celebration week to give an hour long presentation on how DeFi will see the next 100x growth. We aren’t letting Piers get any rest though (sorry Piers!) as he already has 9 AMA’s booked for the next 5 weeks.
The Radix social and community channels have continued to grow. In the last 15 days alone the main twitter account has had over 600k impressions and the official Telegram has seen over 1000 new users as well as daily messages increase 101% to 585 from 110 daily active chatters. We also hit a record 2048 messages on the betanet launch day thanks to the Radix community sending betanet test tokens around! It’s great to see the community excitement about the recent Radix news.
The Radix Validator community is growing, with the R/RadixValidators Reddit reaching 300 subscribers. This has also led to the Radix Discord server nearly reaching 10K members, and seeing a 689% increase in messages sent with 5830 messages in the last two weeks, of which 59% were in the Betanet Validator discussion channel and 944 were in the Betanet discussion channels. Thank you for all the feedback.
The Radix community has continued to show amazing creative flare with the RADMAN superhero comic coming from @Cryptickz twitter and a super detailed Cassandra artwork commissioned by @Thereinalulu.
We also had another Radix first where we hosted a live, in-depth community AMA with Notoros who are building some exciting stuff on Radix. The event was a huge success, thanks to the great questions from the community, and a great first step for activating the growing Radix ecosystem. You can read the full transcript here: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/notoros-dlt-q-a-with-radix-community‍

Radix DLT founder Dan has also been busy with the Cassandra network over on the Radix Labs research side — the community even ran their first test without Dan even being involved where they successfully bootstrapped and ran a sharded network. Dan also hosted the Flappybird game and served it directly to a browser on the decentralized sharded network — check out the clip on his live stream!‍

Development

Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product — Radix DLT

The last two weeks following betanet launch have been an absolute whirlwind for the dev team. It’s been amazing seeing the gates thrown open to the Radix community and to see you all exploring all of the nooks and crannies of every layer of Radix. It may not be obvious from the outside, but we are swimming in invaluable data and feedback from node runners, RPC API consumers, and users of the wallet and explorer.

The most important testing is less about testing “events” than it is about constant observation of a real, live, unpredictable network and that’s precisely what we’ve been getting. Thank you to all who have played with the betanet software, reported your experiences on Discord, and even collected documents of feedback for us!

Our primary task of the past weeks has been to begin to turn this volume of data and feedback into action. We’ve been doing our best to provide hands-on support for things that were initially confusing or buggy, and we’ve been working rapidly behind the scenes on updates. Here’s a snapshot of what’s been going on:

You’ve probably noticed a couple of quick wallet updates that we pushed out, and we have a healthy backlog of enhancements we plan to get through before mainnet — of course in addition to opening up features like staking, messages, and Ledger Nano S connection. Our main goal is ensuring that holders of eXRD will have a secure, usable home to hold, send, and stake XRD tokens after conversion, but the look-and-feel feedback is also useful as we look ahead to more enhancements after mainnet launch.
Our betanet validator node-runners have been killer. You have quickly worked through getting your nodes connected and validating, and the diversity of connected nodes has been exactly what we hoped for to make sure consensus works as it should. Fortunately the fundamentals of network operation have been solid. Community feedback has queued up a number of to-do items for us like enhancements to documentation, some important bug fixes, and bringing clarity to a handful of decisions for mainnet such as how the protocol should react under unusual adverse conditions. We’ll be pushing a sequence of updates to the node roughly every two weeks during betanet to improve the betanet experience and test these fixes and enhancements. And in particular we’ve got some guidance and tools coming for monitoring nodes and the network at large that I think you’ll dig.
We’ve been enjoying the community rooting around in the RPC-API as well as the other handful of APIs that nodes provide. We realize these are thinly documented, but the community engagement so far has shaped some changes we want to make to the APIs before mainnet (and before we push out better documentation of them) to make them more clear and useful. More on this coming soon.

Media/Community

Another 2 busy weeks in the community* and in the media. Here are some of the highlights:

In the media there was a wide coverage of the Radix Betanet launch, i.e. in Yahoo Finance, Bitcoinist, Investing.com, NewsBTC, Block Telegraph, AiThority, Crypto Ninjas, The Daily Chain, BTC Manager
In other news, GoodFi and Piers Ridyard were mentioned in the article ‘Fintech in 2021: The Year’s Hottest Trends So Far’ (Finance Magnats). Radix was mentioned at first place of the ‘5 most awaited mainnet launches for 2021’ (Benzinga). Radix is one of the ‘5 Blockchain Communities Driving Mass Adoption’ (Coincodex) and Radix is considered as a top5 ‘Undervalued DeFi Gem to Keep an Eye On’ (CoinAnnouncer)
Again there was strong support from various opinion leaders in the crypto sector. Piers Ridyard did an excellent interview with Scott Melker (aka ‘The Wolf of All Streets’, 392k followers on Twitter). Piers was live via The Birb Nest for a great interview on YouTube. And Crypto Busy (174k followers) dedicated a segment to the “undervalued gem” Radix
The Radix wallet count has increased by 7% over the last month and is now at 7250 holders!
Amongst many other things, there are 2 dozen AMAs planned between now and the mainnet launch at the end of June. AMAs are an effective way to reach new communities, stay tuned!‍