Overview*
Piers Ridyard, CEO – RDX Works
Welcome to 2022! It's going to be another full year for the crypto space and a super exciting one for Radix. The launch of Scrypto just before Christmas has gone even better than we expected, with many in the community getting up the learning curve even faster than we could have imagined and are already building some super awesome things.
It is still early days, but all the right things are happening.
If you are a developer and haven't yet used Scrypto, I highly recommend it. We think it will be the game-changer that DeFi needs to get the talent into the industry necessary to take DeFi to the next level: https://developers.radixdlt.com/
Outside of Radix, the rise of NFTs are the start of something truly special for mass adoption - more people installed crypto wallets this year for NFTs than for any other token type in 2021. Fun is the gateway to getting mass adoption - it gets people using technology in a low-pressure way before it becomes trusted enough to sit at the center of your life.
Regardless of how you feel about NFTs, they are critical to pulling more people into the crypto revolution. It has been fantastic to see the first NFTs appearing already on Radix! A selection of my personal favorites:
https://radstrike.com/scorpions/
https://twitter.com/ScryptoPunks
Strategy & Marketing
Adam Simmons, CSO - RDX Works
It was straight back into the action for the Marketing team, with many attending CES 2022 in the first full week of the month. We were also joined by some of the community, including @TaserFace6937 from RadixStake, who put in a herculean effort to help out at the event!
As expected during a global pandemic, the total visitor numbers were down for the event compared to normal. However, this did not stop a stream of developers, VCs, media, and other interested people from coming over to the booth to chat about how DeFi is the future of finance, and Radix is the future of DeFi!
Since the Radix booth was in the FinTech area of CES, the general level of knowledge of those who came to speak with us was really high. It allowed us to explain some of the unique benefits of the Radix Public Network and Scrypto to attendees and gain valuable insights into the issues and challenges at the forefront of people's minds.
I'm sure many of you saw the pictures from CES that were shared on the Radix Twitter account, but here are two pictures giving a quick look at the booth and flurry of activity around it when we were giving some presentations:
While some team members were busy on the booth, others were working hard documenting the success and learnings from December and the Alexandria launch campaign. A few highlights included:
- Matt's video about Scrypto received more than 2m views on Twitter. We generated 84,223 link clicks to the new Developer Hub and over 26k social engagements on posts about the launch. There were around 55m impressions in total on social for the Alexandria launch.
- As many keen-eyed people in the community noticed, we were testing out Brave Ads for the Alexandria launch, and they were a great success. The ads generated over 8m impressions and 170k engaged page views from the campaign. We're now looking at how to expand this going forward.
- From influencers, Altcoin Daily and DataDash videos generated more than 144k views.
- We hit a new milestone with the Radix Telegram, reaching 19k members while maintaining a great community atmosphere, excitement, and focus on the tech!
- The $5k creative competition has some fantastic entries. It was fantastic to see so many passionate Radix supporters spending significant time and effort coming up with creative ways of representing Radix. We encourage you to check out the winners here! (side note from Adam personally, Mr. Scrypto DeFi Gains was amazing!)
- Over December, Radix continued to be covered by Crypto_birb, Trader Koz, StrongHedge, TheoTrader, Murfski, TraderDanik ShardiB2, PostyXBT, Trader1SZ, TraderXO, Bitcointrapper,Wagmisaurus, CryptoNagato, CryptoOmega, and Martiniguy YT. Keep your eyes peeled; new influencers are noticing Radix every week, we are excited who will be following the project next!
Finally, to close out my section, I wanted to shout out the DogeCube family and congratulate them for becoming the first project in the Radix ecosystem to be listed on an exchange and CoinGecko!
Development
Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, CPO - RDX Works
First report of the new year! The development team has reassembled and is surveying the landscape on which 2022’s battles will be fought - we expect it will be glorious.
From the network team, the big news is that the release of the new API is imminent, along with the releases of the Node and Gateway Service that deliver it. We’re in the middle of long-duration load testing and documentation for the Gateway Service, and we expect that before the next Radix Report we will have added new API Gateways to our own infrastructure, and released a new version of the Wallet to consume it – more on that when it occurs!
From the Scrypto team, we are overjoyed by all of the code and feedback coming out of the developer community already. This is rapidly informing adjustments to our direction and priorities as we expand Scrypto functionality to make sure that we stay ahead of the real use cases that people have in mind for Scrypto. Most importantly, we’re thrilled that the feedback we consistently hear is that Scrypto really will be the “game-changer” (as the marketing folk like to say) that we hoped it would be for developers in the crypto/DeFi/web3/preferred-buzzword space.
The dev team is now deep in the planning for implementation of Radix Engine v2 and Scrypto on the public network for Babylon. The list of challenges is long to translate the simulator experience to a reliable public network, including things like guaranteeing state integrity, providing deterministic/metered execution of code, managing the Olympia -> Babylon state migration, reimplementing dPoS/staking, and much more.
Stay tuned!
*The Radix Report update comes from team members at RDX Works Ltd