On December 8, #RadFi2022 unveiled the future of Web3. Missed the Livestream? Catch it here.
Every so often, something radically different comes along. Something so far from what we’re used to that it has the potential to change the world as we know it.
After 9 years of building the next phase of financial technology, Radix will do just that.
Web3, crypto, and DeFi aren’t broken – they never worked properly in the first place. Designed to improve on the archaic, self-destructive, and corrupt systems of traditional finance, the roots from which these innovative technologies first sprouted are why we’re still growing today.
Traditional finance (TradFi) has outstayed its welcome. Derived from a world where trade was once simple – and once decentralized – centralizing a global monetary system was never done for the benefit of the people. Some few hundred years later, and one too many manipulations en masse finally gave way, enabling the anonymous creator of Bitcoin – Satoshi Nakamoto – to begin the unraveling of a whole new era of finance, technology, and a radically different way of living.
Nakamoto will be remembered as one of the greatest pioneers in history. Creating a decentralized monetary system that actually stood a chance of making waves in the institutionally-owned financial industry was a monumental feat for mankind. While the mammoth aftershocks of the Bitcoin tsunami continue to rattle traditional finance year after year, the industry it created along the way has grown far too fast for its own liking.
Though revolutionary innovations across Web3 and DeFi have been redefining what finance ‘is’ since inception, as builders persevere on their race towards the finish line, they’ve wound up being followed by the very problems they set out to defeat in the first place.
Fraud, exploits, and fractured infrastructure founded the need for Web3 – and they’re still the driving force behind it. But for those same reasons, the Web3 of today isn’t working.
That’s why Radix spent 9 years building the Web3 of tomorrow.
The Web3 of Tomorrow
Yesterday, #RadFi2022 marked a milestone – not just for the Radix ecosystem, but for everyone sick of the 1000+ ways DeFi, and TradFi, are broken.
Change has been long needed for the crypto industry, but until now – we’ve not had the tools to truly make it happen.
That ends with Radix.
At the rapid pace it’s grown, the crypto industry has been stuck together like a quick spin on Tetris – one solution built after the next in the hopes that each new layer would seal the tears of those before it. From cars to skyscrapers – building like this has never had a happy ending.
People have lost their trust in traditional finance, yet, without a solution fit for their needs, they’ve no choice but to stick with the devil they know. With daily headlines reporting the billions of dollars lost in CeFi and daily hacks reaping havoc across DeFi, how can we expect anyone to trust crypto? To truly enable a future of Web3 fit to meet the demands of a globally lost population, a solution has to be built – from scratch.
In 2023, Radix’s full stack for Web3 will do just that.
After almost a decade of building, the team behind Radix has developed infrastructure designed specifically to support the $400T global financial system. With a core focus on meeting the needs for scalability, security, developer experience, and user experience, the Radix network is the first in crypto history that is actually designed to be able to take Web3 mainstream. At #RadFi2022, this vision was shared with the world.
A Radically Better User Experience
Web3 user experience really, really sucks.
From extremely complex transaction processes to impractical security measures like handwritten seed phrases – adapting DeFi for users has always been left as an afterthought. Aside from the need for a deep level of financial & technological literacy before a DeFi user can even begin to grasp decentralized applications (dApps), the pressures placed on users across DeFi today pose a plethora of critical issues for crypto’s growth in the long run. Take common human error – like misspelled or misplaced seed phrases.
Mistakes like this in TradFi are forgiven easily, but DeFi’s story doesn’t have the same ending. An estimated 20% of Bitcoin alone is already irretrievably lost in the system today due to simple mistakes that have locked thousands of users out of their accounts forever. It doesn’t even take a day in the game to realize that this will never support a global financial system.
With the launch of Babylon Mainnet in Q2 2023, Radix will release five core technologies as part of the Radix Wallet set to revolutionize the way users can interact with dApps. Picture an experience as safe as traditional finance and as intuitive as the best Web2 apps – that right there is the Radix Wallet.
A Radically Better Programming Experience
The crypto industry is home to some of the greatest minds of our time. Yet, the continued shortfalls of the infrastructure they’re forced to build on are fundamentally blocking them from ever being able to truly unleash the power of their ability and create an ecosystem fit for global adoption.
Ever wondered why less than 1% of developers globally build on Web3? Developers need tools that let them express their Web3 ideas in code easily, quickly, and securely. Until Scrypto, that hasn’t been possible.
Unlike other smart contract languages, Scrypto is the world’s first programming language that removes the barriers for developers to do what they do best. With most smart contract environments today, due to their overly-complex design, developers spend a reported 80% of their time ensuring their code is secure and only 20% building features and functionality. Even then, flaws in the foundations of smart contracts have amassed billions of dollars worth of exploits and hacks in 2022 alone.
Project development aside, the years of study it takes to learn most smart contract languages can be credited for much of the slow developer growth we’re seeing in Web3 today.
With Scrypto, developers can learn faster, build easily, and launch innovative projects on the Radix Network without worrying about risking their users’ livelihoods. With Scrypto, building in Web3 finally makes sense.
A Radically Better Execution Environment
Without good dApps, there aren’t users. Without users, it’s always going to be the “demo” form of DeFi.
One of the biggest barriers to building solid, secure dApps today falls right back to a network’s execution environment (otherwise known as a virtual machine). On most of today’s popular networks, what should be simple concepts – like token swaps– are incredibly complex processes due to the way the networks are built and their fragmented approach to processing assets, opening them up to the colossal hacks we see each year.
In the Radix Engine, asset behavior is baked in – with assets and asset security being a primary function of the network… not an afterthought. Common hacks like re-entrancy attacks & spend approval hacks often seen on networks like Ethereum become near impossible on the Radix Engine.
With the Radix Engine, it’s how it should have always been.
A Radically Better Consensus Layer
For Web3 to support the $400T global financial system, it needs to be able to scale, infinitely. It also needs to create an environment for billions of digital finance users to access and move their assets freely and securely. In today’s DeFi, solutions built to achieve scalability all have one critical problem: to achieve more scalability they sacrifice atomic composability. Without atomic composability, Web3 will never offer the user experience needed for global adoption.
Cerberus is the world’s first consensus algorithm that doesn’t break atomic composability as it scales. Using an existing consensus mechanism – sharding — Radix’s consensus layer will enable infinite scalability on its Xi’an release in 2024, while maintaining interoperability at the highest standard.
To sustain global adoption, Web3 needs to become an asset super-highway – scaling interconnectivity as it evolves.
Next Stop: Global Adoption
Building a new map for the future isn’t light work, and the developments achieved with crypto in just 14 years are groundbreaking. But, success is not linear, and at the core of almost all of the industry’s growing pains is the simple fact that so far – we’ve been treating it as though it is. The early values Web3 was built on are the very reason it's still growing, but that doesn’t mean sticking with the early frameworks is the right way to go.
To deliver mainstream Web3 and mainstream DeFi, the whole technology stack has to be built and designed together. Only then can the industry deliver the user experiences, developer tools, and network infrastructure that can actually take this industry global.
By starting at the end and working backward, Radix is finally making that happen.
See the true potential of Web3 with the full #RadFi2022 experience here.