Overview - Piers Ridyard, CEO
The sudden de-pegging of UST and the resultant hyperinflation of Luna continues to have ramifications for the wider crypto market. These market echos are going to keep coming - we have not yet seen the full pain that this is going to inflict, both to teams that used UST as part of their treasury (we did not, and do not speculate with our team treasury), as well as the hostile regulatory response that could occur.
However, all is not doom and gloom - the purpose of open source code is not to create perfect code the first time, but to iterate towards something safe, resilient and reliable. The same is true with the open source financial system that everyone in the DeFi/Web3.0 industry is currently building. The end goal of the system is the same - safe, resilient and reliable finance - one that presents an open platform for anyone to use and compete for a global audience.
These times are the times when we learn the most, filter for what has worked and what is probably not going to work, and then rebuild something better. The 2017 ICO boom taught us the importance of secondary market liquidity. The 2022 DeFi crash is teaching us the dangers of self-referencing systems and leverage.
The difference between a bull market and a bear market has always fascinated me. Major innovations in the crypto space only really seem to come out during bear markets. I am a huge fan of the concept of Deep Work - a thing that is only possible when the noise of the outside world is reduced so that slower, deeper thoughts can emerge. I have high conviction that these market cycles are a huge contributing factor to making Deep Work possible for great teams working in the crypto space.
Having gone through roughly three bull/bear cycles now, this period is actually exciting for me. While capital drives the markets over the short term, it is real value creation that drives the markets over the long term. As Radix has always been built around long term value creation, this feels like a massive opportunity as the next cycle is where I feel like Radix is going to be in an incredibly strong position for the next phase of DeFi and Web 3.0 - a position that has only been possible after years and years of building and testing - plus the phenomenal Scrypto and Radix community.
Scrypto and the Radix Engine keep exceeding expectations, and we are already seeing the first glimmers of what can truly be achieved with a usable set of tools for building DeFi. In my (biased) opinion, the next year is going to be a bumper year for the next wave of innovation for users of DeFi and Web 3.0 - all powered by Radix.
Super exciting time to be alive.
Strategy & Marketing (Adam Simmons, CSO & Jeremy Epstein, CMO)
“The excellence of the initiation of any movement is its timeliness.”
-Lao Tzu, Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching.
For the last 2 months, we’ve been talking about the Brave takeover campaign scheduled for May 10th. As you know, our goal was to drive higher levels of awareness and welcome more people on the first step of their #RadixRevelation.
Who knew that when we committed in January to May 10th, that we would run smack into one of the greatest crypto meltdown weeks in the past few years?
Lesser marketing teams might have gotten cold feet. We certainly heard from Brave that many of their other clients had pulled out of campaigns for that week, but we decided to persevere.
Well-timed?
Some would argue “yes” and some would argue “no”. For that decision, I leaned on another wise, old sage, the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet.
“Be fearful when others are greedy; Greedy when others are fearful.”
In the end, we generated a mindblowing 49 million impressions and attracted 2.1m to the Radix website between May 10th and May 11th. To put this in perspective, this is 30 times higher than our monthly site visits in just two days.
Our Brave brand lift survey which was conducted “pre” and “post” the campaign revealed that awareness of Radix increased 28% on the platform since our takeover. That's an additional 2.5m people on their first step of their #RadixRevelation, with more than half of Brave users recalling seeing our ads.
Radix’s brand perception increased significantly post campaign, with 20% of Brave’s audience now believing that we may have the best technology of all layer 1 protocols.
Not only that, 1 in 5 Brave users consider themselves a developer and since our takeover campaign, more than 33% of developers on Brave would consider building on Radix.
We saw a lot of activity in our Discord (it was the most popular social channel for new visitors-imho, a good sign) and got some great immediate feedback on Scrypto.
TBH, beyond any campaign results, I’m INCREDIBLY proud of the extended marketing team here at RDX Works. The amount of collaboration, effort, and determination to make this big push a success was inspiring. We learned a lot about how to work together as a team on bigger initiatives and I believe the value of this campaign will manifest in more ways than one over the months and years to come.
Many people have asked for the images that were used for the campaign for their own desktops and Meet/Zoom backgrounds. You can get them here. Go crazy. (I can hear the lawyers now).
In other news:
Members of our Ambassador program have been killing it lately, leading some fantastic initiatives! We will release more information on this program in the next 2 weeks, but three worth mentioning now…
- The Radix Open Arena Chess tournament had 2,741 players, generating some good traffic to the Radix website and Discord channel via live streams and co-promotion by Lichess.com. A huge thank you Gpel for leading this initiative from start to finish!
- AVaunt has been hard at work organizing “Atomic Series: London”, a live half day event which includes presentation from projects building on Radix, a panel discussing the future of Web3 on Radix, talks by members of the RDX Works team, and a nice social event in the evening. Spaces are limited so please sign up now if you intend to come!
- CptCharles has led the charge with a full overhaul of the Radix Discord, creating the Radix Task Force which is working to spread Radix Revelations (DM @Cpt_Charles on Telegram to get involved), and designing some beautiful one page Radix explainers!
- The latest MeetUp in Nairobi had 20 people. So did Helsinki (even though I missed it b/c my flight was canceled). Barcelona and Kentucky great events also.
- Piers was at the Blockdown conference in Croatia, appearing on two panels and doing a keynote at the conference. These videos will be released to the community soon so that you can get the Piers experience even if you weren’t in attendance.
- “Core Story” deck is ready to go. Contact Jacob_XRD via the meetup Telegram to get a copy.
- We’ve got a PR firm working on helping us get the story out about FooHack. I’ll be interested to see how they perform for us.
- Keep your eyes on the Radix Swag store, tomorrow there will be an OciSwap invasion! Their merch will be available for the next 4 weeks, with all profits going to Sea Shepherd Global. Keep an eye on our Twitter, we will run this comp again, who might we see next?
Next thing to mark on your calendar: June 9-12 in Austin for Consensus.
Development (Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, CPO)
With Scrypto v0.4.1 behind us and the Olympia coordinated forking update in the final stages, the focus for the tech team has shifted to paving the way for the Babylon Alphanet. That means marrying up the Java-based node to the Rust-based Radix Engine v2. There’s a ton of heavy lifting to do here, and we have just concluded a lengthy design session on how the pieces of the system will talk to each other, including what portions of the node will be immediately moving to a Rust implementation.
Related to that design session, node runners can expect to continue to run the JVM through Babylon release, and at some point post-Babylon but pre-Xi’an there will be a shift to a fully native binary compiled from Rust.
In Scrypto news, we have seen a tremendous uptick in developer activity since the Lisbon developer event and the release of v0.4. It is heartening to see how welcoming and helpful the community has been to all the newcomers, and gratifying to watch the old-timers who have already adopted the asset-oriented programming mindset sharing good design patterns when newer devs come in with a Solidity-style approach to a problem. It’s hard to believe that Alexandria released less than six months ago and we’re already this far along as a community.
Keep building, and keep the interesting use cases coming! We love watching the lightbulb go on over someone’s head when the asset-oriented way of doing things suddenly clicks.