The CEO of Radix DLT Piers Ridyard recently conducted Q&A sessions with the @DeFiRaccoons and @Crypto_Talkzs Telegram communities, who have 25k and 23k members respectively.
These Q&A sessions have proved to be a great way for Radix to connect with the wider crypto community, and some excellent questions were put forward and answered by Piers.
As there is some overlap between the two interviews we have combine them together for ease of access, the full Q&A's can be found via the links above.
If you have any follow up questions you are welcome to ask via our Telegram or Discord.
Hello everybody, thank you for joining us today for another DeFi Raccoons AMA session! Today we’ll be talking with the team from Radix! I hope you’ve made yourself comfortable and will enjoy today's session, so let’s get started. Welcome, please tell Raccoons a bit about yourselves!
Cool! So, I am Piers Ridyard, CEO of Radix. So background wise I went to university to study aerospace engineering. Changed to Chinese and business. I learned Chinese. Came back to the UK, did my Chartered Financial Analyst exam. Then went and worked in investment banking at JP Morgan. Then got a training contract to do law. Did my GDL and LPC. Then started manufacturing electronics. Then did Ethereum mining. Then created a YCombinator company. Then came to Radix.
Q. Would you mind giving us a brief introduction about Radix DLT?
Radix is the only decentralized network where developers will be able to build quickly without the constant threat of exploits and hacks, where every improvement will get rewarded, and where scale will never be a bottleneck. We realised that there were three problems holding back the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) space that needed to be solved before it could be brought to every person on earth:
1. On average, solidity developers currently spend around 90% of their time securing their code and only about 10% writing functionality. Despite that, Ethereum has still seen over $285m of hacks. Radix solves this with a completely new development language, Scrypto, and a completely new execution environment so that developers can build faster, more secure, and better DeFi apps.
2. DeFi is built on open source code, but very few developers who contribute to that code base ever see any rewards from doing so. We have built a developer royalty system that makes sure all developers get rewarded for helping to build DeFi apps on Radix
3. DeFi is currently massively expensive to use because the of the lack of scalability. Ethereum 2.0, Avalanche, Polkadot and all these other layer 1's do not solve the issue of scalability of DeFi because of the way they are sharding, which breaks the liquidity of the ecosystem. Radix scales DeFi linearly without causing the same issues.
Q. What are your main features that distinguish you from other projects and what competitive advantages do you have?
Sure, that is easy:
1. A way of building DeFi that massively reduces the risks of exploits and hacks vs building on Ethereum
2. A developer royalty system the rewards all developers that contribute to the Radix ecosystem
3. The ability to scale DeFi to millions of DeFi application operations per second, meaning every person in the world can use DeFi
Q. What differentiates the components created by Radix Engine as solution measures for Ethereum smart contracts, from the problems they are actually solving? How does this technology benefit the development of ETH chains and how is it applicable?
Radix Engine components are massively more efficient vs Ethereum smart contracts, both in terms of how secure they are from a code point of view, but also in how they execute. This gives Radix two key advantages:
1. More secure smart contracts
2. Faster public ledger for DeFi
None of this will benefit any Ethereum chains, Or any ledger that uses solidity or the EVM. This is an entirely new building paradigm
Q. The Radix founder seems to be doing regular Twitch streams. A very nice way of including the community in the process of building a project. It also boosts transparency. The latest streams were focused on community testing ‘Cassandra’. Who/what exactly is Cassandra and how does it fit in the overall plan of Radix? Why was Cassandra chosen as a name for this?
Cassandra is the name of the research project that Dan is building to test our fully sharded decentralized ledger. It allows us to run crazy experiments without needing to worry about breaking developer experiences, and test ideas. Good example, recently we did a 24k atomic cross shard transaction test with the community.
Another one, Dan imported a decent chunk of Twitter into the ledger and recreated a decentralized Twitter where people could now tip each other. Another one, Dan recreated the Dfinity "ICP". Then ran Flappy Bird & other games on the ledger.
Q. Why did you name it as "Cassandra"?
Cassandra was a Trojan priestess of Apollo in Greek mythology cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed. We thought it would be fun to demonstrate technology many people say is impossible under the name Cassandra.
Q. Are you aware the increasing dog theme meme coins? The question is should the community be more mindful of the effects this has on the reputation of this industry and how it might hurt taking crypto seriously & hurt adoption??
One of the things that makes crypto powerful is that it is fun. It is different from traditional finance because of that - it doesn't try to be too serious and instead does a lot of stuff that is playful - take SushiSwap for example.
I think that these sort of projects are necessary at the phase the industry is in today - a place where it must break through the noise. We are still very very far from main stream adoption.
So, it can seem harmful around the reputation because people don't take it seriously, but it has the flip side of raising the awareness of the space. I don't suggest buying the coins, but I think their benefit might outweigh the harm - especially when it does things like help charities as well
Q. Aren’t you afraid that - since you also build everything from the ground up - that projects will have taken the majority of adoption?
Ha! We aren't even scratching the surface of what DeFi is capable of. If we multiplied the TLV of DeFi today by 100, it still would only be a small % of TLV in global finance. If you want to build tall buildings you have to build strong foundations. Digging foundations takes time. Everyone is building on sand right now, I am not worried
Q. Why not just do eth layer 2 scaling solutions?
Layer 2 doesn't solve the issue, just moves it. There isn't one layer 2 solution there are multiple. We are already seeing them hit their limits(!!) and they cannot communicate between themselves atomically. This means that DeFi liquidity is going to be fragmented, developers are going to have an even harder job, and the scale issues are still not solved.
To stay up to date or learn more about Radix DLT please follow the links below.
Join the Community:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/radixdlt
Telegram: https://t.me/radix_dlt
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/Radix/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/WkB2USt
Radix Resources:
Podcast: https://www.radixdlt.com/podcast
Blog: https://www.radixdlt.com/blog/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RadixDLT