Overview
It’s a special intro to the Radix Report this week, as Adam and Sophie are filling in for Piers - thus the slightly different writing style. There has been a flurry of news coming out since the last report, so we have a lot to cover.
First up, we’re continuing to grow the RDX Works team! Yesterday we announced that Jeremy has joined the team as CMO, and another 4 people joined him on Monday, including 2 community liaisons, a senior performance marketing manager, and a product manager. This push to expand the team globally is key to ensure we continue to drive forward on delivering our mission and roadmap, as well as growing awareness and support of existing products. At our current rate, we are likely to hit 50 full-time people on the team by the next Radix Report! If you or someone you know may be interested in joining the team, make sure to check out our careers page: https://www.radixdlt.com/careers
Thanks to the support and reliability of the Radix node-runner community, RTJL announced that they will be halving the number of nodes (from 8 to 4) they operate and stake to. This will leave 1 active node in each region and reduce the RTJL staked tokens by half. This will open up 4 spots in the top 100 validators on Feb 22nd, when the change will be made. Delegating stake is critical for the decentralization of the network, so if you’re an XRD token holder, make sure to research the nodes you may wish to stake to! There is a helpful guide on Radix Learn about how to choose which validators to stake to.
On the long-term strategy side, we’ve been making progress on some of the big opportunities and challenges. A new job posting at RDX Works for a Governance Lead is now live, we’ve detailed our thinking around managing a multiyear mission, and given details around the wallet roadmap specifically regarding the Babylon wallet work. Behind the scenes, work is ongoing with the Instabridge entity’s application for a Virtual Currency Exchange license in Jersey, which if approved is the first step for Instabridge being able to swap more tokens and even fiat. We have also been hard at work with the ever-exciting planning around changing crypto regulation and tax rules coming from the jurisdictions we operate in, and how we manage those changes! On a lighter note, it was also great to see the success of Radix has been quoted in an interview in the NY Times!
While it has been busy at RDX Works, we’re continually blown away by the amazing things people in the community are doing. There is great development ongoing, projects launching, NFTs being reserved, community meet-ups, and much, much more. Everyone working on Radix loves seeing the fantastic things the fledgling community is already producing, and we hear loud and clear that we need to celebrate the achievements and success of the community - this is a key focus for us internally at the moment, and we’re aiming to provide more clarity by the next Radix Report.
Strategy & Marketing (Adam Simmons, CSO* & Jeremy, CMO*)
As this is Jeremy’s first Radix Report, I will hand the whole section over to him this week - take it away, Jeremy!
From a marketing perspective, the journey to “Radix Revelation” looks like a barbell or a double-humped camel.
For example, you, our community members, continue to do a great job of generating awareness and engagement. We’ve seen projects get launched and community-led events happening, such as the amazing event in Kentucky organized by OfficallyTimeWasted and Miso. It’s wonderful to see such a positive reaction.
If you are interested in helping bring about the global Radix Revelation by hosting a meetup (supported by RDX Works), please join us in the Meet Up Telegram or Discord to discuss. There will also be an AMA on how to run an event in the Telegram Meetup group on the 11th of February at 7 PM UTC.
This week, we welcomed 2 new community liaisons (in the US and Asia) to help improve responsiveness and engagement globally.
On the other side of the journey, we are seeing much success in building awareness of Radix among our key audiences of developers in North America and Europe. Our Twitter follower count has now surpassed 130k with solid movement across our other social channels. Also, we are extremely cost-effective at generating interest through our ads on Brave and Twitter and will be adding Reddit (and other platforms) in the near future to test. To further improve this, we have added a dedicated Performance Marketing manager to optimize our paid efforts and refine our targeting of developers by helping them to discover Scrypto-driven Radix Revelation. That’s an iterative process, but we are headed in the right direction.
Where we see a big opportunity for improvement is between the initial interest and the more involved community activities/engagement. To address that, we have undertaken two initiatives, one from a content side and the other from a digital journey perspective. Over the next few weeks and months, we will be rolling out more consumable forms of content to help all of us more effectively tell the story of Radix and explain our unique differentiators in a compelling way to those who may not be ready to consume 30 pages of content. Similarly, we are doing a comprehensive review of our landing pages and website experience for new (and returning) visitors to help ensure that people get to the best destination for them as quickly as possible.
This is my first Radix Report write up and I know it’s a bit of a change since past ones. Please join the “Wen Marketing” Discord channel and let me know if you like/hate this approach and what you would like to see and know in the future.
Development (Russell Harvey, CTO* & Matthew Hine, CPO*)
The big news out of development is that we’re nearing completion of the v0.3 release of Scrypto & the Radix Engine simulator, which introduces another big block of functionality - the transaction layer. Up to this point, we’ve talked a lot about composability but we haven’t been able to show how it will actually work at Babylon and beyond. With the release of v0.3, we’ll be getting the first version of this into developers’ hands, and demonstrating the power and flexibility it offers to frontend devs as well. Our target is to have this released before the next Radix Report, so stay tuned for a more detailed announcement soon.
With the successful release of the Core API, Network Gateway, and updated Wallet & Explorer behind us, we’re taking some time to address community requests, including some additions to the Gateway API requested by node-runners. We’re also gathering great data from usage of the Network Gateway at scale, and figuring out places where we can improve the indexing or query plans to minimize the latency and server load of the most commonly used endpoints.
Finally, we’re still hard at work on some Olympia updates, with coordinated forking expected to lead the pack and provide a straightforward way for the network to smoothly accept protocol updates without any downtime.