It’s been hinted a few times in the recent Radix Reports, and if you’re reading this blog you may notice that radixdlt.com has undergone a refresh! There is less blue, refined messaging, and some new illustrative style. In this post, we’re going to give some more context to the updated website and messaging.
Explaining Radix
Radix is growing, and the first thing people want to know is what Radix does, what problem we’re solving, and why they should join us in our mission to build the future home of global finance.
This next wave of users and advocates need top-line messaging that is a little easier to understand than “a full-stack approach, re-engineering consensus, distributed virtual machines, executable on-ledger code, DeFi component building, DeFi application building and developer incentives.” (although this does still have an important role to play in further reading!)
So at the beginning of the year, work started on refining how we explain Radix. At its base, this means that when someone first hears about Radix, they need to quickly understand our vision and how we will execute on our value proposition.
The first step of this was getting to the simplest form of our core message and vision;
We are building Radix to be the only platform capable of supporting the global financial system of both today and tomorrow.
From there, we needed to outline the key pillars required to achieve the ambitious goal of supporting (and growing) a $100tn+ industry. We needed to explain how the different aspects of the Radix technology stack will enable us to bring DeFi to the mass market. So where did we get to, and why did we settle there?
Developers First
Innovation in DeFi is rapid. It is what makes the industry exciting and perfectly poised to revolutionize the global financial system. Building fast has always been something technology companies can do well, but often not without breaking things. In finance, unfortunately, this can mean a lot more than just a broken website!
Being able to build fast is a total contrast to traditional finance, where siloed, permissioned systems are the norm. Not only is innovation stifled in traditional finance, but there is a direct incentive to stop innovation - traditional finances walled gardens also stop competitors.
DeFi has unleashed a wave of motivated, intelligent, and passionate entrepreneurs and developers who know that this is the start of a financial revolution. They are the ones who will make it happen. The problem, today DeFi developers have to fight against the constant threat of hacks and exploits, and therefore spend the majority of their time fighting for security rather than innovating.
At Radix, we know that for DeFi to thrive, it needs a purpose-built programming environment that enables fast AND secure development. That is what we will deliver with the Radix Engine and Scrypto. This is what will unleash the next wave of DeFi apps.
Incentivising Every Improvement
DeFi apps today only exist because of developer communities in the tens of thousands who have donated millions of lines of code, blood, sweat and tears into making these applications possible on things like Ethereum.
If you build a highly useful piece of code that enables billions of dollars of assets to seamlessly flow between opportunities, there is no doubt that you have added a huge amount of value to the DeFi ecosystem. Yet today, developers can only get rewarded for that contribution if they combine it with a full feature DeFi application, launch a token, or otherwise find a way to monetize. This stops incremental improvements.
On Radix, everyone that makes the network and ecosystem better can get rewarded. Gone are the traditional finance days where only the financial elite benefit. Gone are the days where individual developers cannot contribute and be rewarded for their contributions. With the Radix system of on-ledger royalties, developers who contribute code to the blueprint catalog, can set a royalty fee (in XRD) each time the component is used in a DeFi application function.
This means that not only will Radix enable developers to build DeFi code both quickly and securely, but they will also be incentivised to do so.
Innovation + Incentives = Growth
Last but not least, once you have a thriving ecosystem of innovative DeFi applications, you will start seeing assets and users flow in to capitalize on the opportunities presented. The result - more demand on the network from users interacting with dApps, but also dApps to dApp transactions that enable much of the magic of DeFi.
Once Radix gives developers the tools and incentives to build this ecosystem, we need to be ready to scale. At the heart of this is Cerberus, Radix’s consensus protocol. In its fully sharded form, it will enable unlimited linear scalability. That means that as demand on the network grows, adding more nodes increases the throughput - all while still maintaining cross-shard atomic composability.
This is the polar opposite of traditional financial products, where when more complexity is added, more intermediaries are needed. We all know where that leads; more profit going to them and less to the end-user, and a high degree of friction to do something as simple as sending money overseas. DeFi today isn’t much better, where high transaction fees make DeFi impractical for anyone using less than thousands of dollars of assets. While there are other solutions trying to relieve the scalability problem on blockchain platforms, they either have their own bottlenecks in the future or break fundamental aspects required for DeFi such as atomic composability.
Bringing it Together
Combined, this makes Radix 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.
This is the core of Radix. This is what Radix is building. And this is why Radix will revolutionize the global financial system.
As always, we would love to hear your feedback on what we’re doing. Join the Radix Telegram or Discord today and let us know what you think of the new website!