Radix Report - February 18th 2021

February 18, 2021

Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO - Radix DLTThe last two weeks continue to be solidly on the bull for the crypto market, with Bitcoin sailing past the $50k mark, and more rumours about increasingly large corporates looking to follow Tesla’s lead and moving to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

With the increased economic stimulus via printing money both in the US and globally, the stability of fiat money continues to cause worries for corporations with large amounts of cash on their balance sheet (looking at you Apple) - and more and more evidence is emerging that the non-crypto world is starting to understand why a supra-national store of value is meaningful and important.

Closer to home, at Radix we have started the process of interviewing experienced Solidity and DeFi developers about their experiences with writing and deploying dApps. From these interviews, the Solidity security tax is hard to overstate. It is not uncommon for a team to spend around 10% of their development time writing functionality, and 90% of their time working out all the ways that functionality could have bugs, break or be attacked.

Despite this, we are still seeing the results of more and more sophisticated attacks of the type that the Yearn crew have just had to deal with across many interconnected DeFi applications.

These are not trivial problems, and writing financial applications is complex and careful work. It is precisely interviews of this nature that make me so excited about what is coming down the line for Radix over the next 12 months.

Strategy

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLTIt’s been an exciting two weeks for the strategy and marketing teams, as some big news went live and continued work both behind the scenes and on centre stage have continued to build momentum.

We recently announced that Radix has launched GoodFi - welcoming founding members to the alliance such as Chainlink, Aave, Messari, mStable & more. As many in the Radix community will know, we believe DeFi is the future of finance - something that has been reinforced by the 40x increase in total value locked in the industry in the last year alone. This still only represents a tiny fraction of the $111T that is the global financial industry; which is why we founded GoodFi to help get 100m people into DeFi by 2025!
Across the Radix social channels alone, we saw nearly 200k impressions and helped grow the official Radix Twitter account to nearly 20k followers and saw the Telegram channel exceed 1k daily messages, only the 2nd time since the initial token distribution - so thank you all for the amazing support.
As linked to in the dev section above, we have had some new videos go live on the Radix DLT Youtube channel. One of the most exciting was the Olympia Drop 2 Demo, which we know many people had been waiting for.
On February 14th there was a lot of love (excuse the valentines day pun!) shown for eXRD on Uniswap with a new milestone of $24m of liquidity being achieved. Average daily volume for eXRD across all markets has continued to increase from $2.09m[1] up to $2.5m[2].
On February 15th, the 7 day simple moving average price of eXRD was confirmed above the $0.15 threshold, triggering a token unlock as per the Radix Economics Whitepaper.

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As started in the previous Radix Report, this is a great place to highlight community members who have gone the extra mile. In this addition, we want to recognise Florian Pieper (@fpieper) who has been giving detailed answers in the Radix Telegram on a range of technical topics. Thank you, Florian! If you see people going above and beyond in the community, be sure to let one of our team know.

Development

Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product - Radix DLTThis time the community update is off-sync with our sprint schedule, so I thought I'd highlight some technical team activity that's not strictly "resolved items on the backlog" stuff:

The Radix tech team has been hiring fairly aggressively, as we work toward not just delivery of Olympia but also a new set of capabilities in Alexandria for the end of 2021. You may have met Russ and Raul here or maybe Theo and Sergiy on-camera here - and you'll certainly be hearing more from our new documentation specialist Ray. We've also got a product designer coming on soon to help with an exciting new effort we hope to start talking about mid-year. And by all means, take a look at our careers page and join us!
As we dive into Drop 3, we've taken the time to reorganize ourselves a bit to get laser-focused on what we need to deliver in betanet (and of course mainnet to follow soon after). Up to now we've been a more or less monolithic tech team, but we've now organized into Network, Builders, and Users Teams - each aligned to serving one of these three groups of important "customers" that our tech needs to serve in betanet, Olympia, and beyond.
We know everyone is anxiously awaiting more information about betanet participation. Much preparation is going into defining the best ways for everyone to help us with testing – not just as validator node-runners, but wallet-users, full-node-runners, and consumers of our Java library. Patience will be rewarded soon, with plenty of time for everyone to get ready.

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I’ll throw in at least one nice little development win worth highlighting. Some of you have noticed, if following along in github, that nodes have generally been creating quite a lot of storage space load. Sergiy has attacked this head-on and has now achieved a drop in storage growth of about 75%. We expect more optimizations to be possible as well, but this is certainly a huge improvement (for us and for anybody playing with node running), so cheers to Sergiy!

Media & Community

Another busy and eventful 2 weeks in the media and our community have come to an end. We are having the impression that we are hitting the next gear in terms of visibility and are confidently looking towards the exciting future. Here’s a quick rundown of the last 2 weeks:

In an excellent interview with Charlie Shrem, 180k followers, Piers talked about Robinhood, CeFi, DeFi and what makes Radix special - check it out here!
As usual, Radix has been covered in various media articles, such as ‘The Top 3 Next Generation Layer 1 Blockchain Protocols’ (BTC Manager) and ‘How Radix Is Securing Smart Contracts From Hacks’ (Blockmanity)
Not surprisingly the Radix-led GoodFi Alliance has been covered in many publications, i.e. CoinTelegraph, Investing.com, Coinmerce, CryptoDiffer, AlexaBlockchain, Coinspeaker, AiThority and also mentioned in the ICO Drops newsletter.
Radix has a strong 2 weeks in social media and received lots of visibility, some examples are Dan’s tweet at Crypto Birb that got over 20k impressions, the Radix Moon 2021 tweet thread with an impressive 120k views, Birb’s funny reply regarding Cassandra, Martini Guy covering Radix and GoodFi, Posty’s eXRD TA, trading legend Sicarious also doing eXRD TA, Pentoshi sharing Piers’ Charlie Shrem interview - and many many more mentions.
Dan did his usual bi-weeky and mind-bending AMA in the main Radix group
The eXRD wallet count has more than 4x since Jan 1st 2021. All numbers are looking great.
International news: Leading Turkish influencer Krypto Emre, 140k followers, has covered Radix in a recent video and thus kick-started Radix’s visibility in the important Turkish market. We are looking forward to much more to come for the Turkish market!