Radix Report — 21st January 2021

Originally posted 21st January 2021 Radixdlt.com/blog

OVERVIEW

Welcome to the first fortnightly Radix Report — a quick rundown on what has happened in the world of Radix in the last two weeks and a great way of staying up to date with the work the Radix DLT team is doing on getting the decentralised finance protocol up and running!

January is always an interesting time of year — a month where everyone starts to pick up the bits of their brain that were resting over Christmas and starts revving the engines again to get back into the race.

Radix ended 2020 with Drop 2 of the Radix Public Network development code, one of the single biggest deliveries of the first version of the public ledger and a key milestone in hitting our Q2 2021 mainnet target.

The first half of January has seen the development start to ramp up on Drop 3, with the dev team transitioning from just development of the core functionality to testing and hardening of the code. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a lot to build, but it is a key point in the maturing of the codebase and moving towards a functional public network.

On the non-tech side, January has seen a lot of the groundwork covered for our first major listing, covered by Adam in the strategy section, as well as a lot of great coverage that the Radix community has been generating for the project.

We’ve also had a few great new hires since coming back after the holiday season, and so it is great to see the team back both refreshed and enlarged to take on the challenges ahead for 2021!

DEVELOPMENT

A few points of interest taken from the team’s resolved items list:

• For those watching our Github, you might notice that we’ve reorganized the project into a “monorepo” rather than a large number of separate repos. This has proven to be greatly preferable in our development flow.
• We’re continuing to get valuable results from the test and monitoring infrastructure we have for internal testnets. This has allowed us to make some improvements that cause the network to behave better in some edge case situations where validators fail or “fall behind” the consensus process by a large amount.
• We improved nodes so that they may auto-restart if they experience a crash for whatever reason.
• Starting to think about our particular needs for betanet, we’ve got our token faucet working with a REST-like API that will enable off-ledger requests for betanet tokens.

STRATEGY

• On January 14th, it was announced that Radix will be listed on Bitfinex. Trading opened on January 21st with USD and BTC pairs. Listing eXRD on Bitfinex will see Radix featured on the 4th largest exchange by volume, as well as open up a BTC market for eXRD.
• The third month of the Radix Liquidity Incentives has started, with 25m eXRD being distributed to users who have staked liquidity for the eXRD/USDC pair on Uniswap. We are continuing to see great support from the Radix community for this program, with total liquidity increasing from $11.5m on Jan 1st 2021 to around $20m on Jan 13th.
• The first design sprint of the year was completed, focusing on how Radix (and the industry at large) can drive awareness and growth of the DeFi sector as a whole. This was very successful and will feed into both some initiatives Radix is planning, as well as refining our future planning.

MEDIA/COMMUNITY

The first half of January has been a busy month of planning, content production and kicking off marketing activities. Here are some of the noteworthy events from around the Radix Community*:

• Media coverage included the following publications: ‘3 Ethereum alternatives that banks should be monitoring’ (Bitcoinist), ‘How Brexit Could Help London Evolve From A Fintech Center Into A DeFi Hub’ (Forbes), ‘Why Transferwise’s Co-Founder Backed This Blockchain Company?’ (NewsBTC), ‘How Radix Is Bringing Interoperability to DeFi’ (TheDrum), ‘Can Radix Propel DeFi Into the Mainstream?’ (TechBullion) and ‘Tamper-Proof DeFi: Radix Aims to Make Hacks a Thing of the Past’ (Coinspeaker). The main Radix blog also published the important blog What is DeFi Composability and Why Does it Matter?
• Radix has received various high profile mentions in social media, including from Twitter legends such as Birb, Secrets of Crypto, Pentoshi, StackingUSD, Moonwalker, Blkbeard, Mocho, Posty and an in-depth report by Cactus.
• Two popular video explainers were published and very well received, Price Vesting Explained and Cerberus — A story of Islands and Speedboats. The Radix Community are keen to release many more of these going forward and would love to know which topics you would like to see explainer videos about — you can send suggestions to contact@getradix.com.
• A community-run Uniswap Trading Contest started on Jan 15 with 600 registrations and 84 active traders. The www.Getradix.com website has received a facelift, many new reports have been added to the Live Stats page, Radix 2-pagers are now available in 5 languages, the Radix Telegram Dev Chat group has been formed, and many many more positive developments.

*activity that is happening independently of any Radix entity or employee, but that we think is cool!